Tomorrow, December 13, 2025, is the 75th anniversary of my mother and grandparents arriving in the United States from a displaced persons camp outside Vienna. 

On that day in 1950, the USNS General C.H. Muir arrived in New York, one of many ships during the post-World War II years carrying refugees from the port of Bremerhaven, Germany to the United States. The passenger manifest listed my grandparents and their young daughter:

Charles Scherz, age 38
Dora Scherz, age 32
Amalia Scherz, age 2

Under nationality, they were identified as “stateless.”

My mother grew up in the Bronx, where she spoke English and a bissel Yiddish, freely and proudly practiced Judaism, attended New York City’s outstanding public education institutions, and transformed her nationality from “stateless” to American. Reflecting on the many personal and professional achievements this country enabled for her, she often referred to herself as “the immigrant success story.”

America’s policies and attitudes toward immigration at that time expressed a long-standing wariness of foreigners: The government maintained national origin quotas established in the 1920s that favored immigrants of European origin; immigrants continued to face both overt and subtle discrimination in their daily lives. Yet the Refugee Acts of 1948 and 1953, and the end of the total ban on Asian immigration in 1952, reflected sympathy to the humanitarian needs of those arriving from post-war Europe, and attenuated the racism and xenophobia expressed in our legislation. While not the foundation of America’s immigration policy, compassion and care for human dignity had become a greater part of the conversation.

Seventy five years after my mother’s arrival in America, it is heartbreaking to acknowledge how far we have regressed—how compassion and care for human dignity are nearly absent from our system. One does not have to agree with open borders or progressive immigration reform to see the inhumanity of separating children from their parents, holding people in cages, and fostering a climate of fear.

The Torah famously commands us 36 times regarding our behavior toward the stranger. Commenting on the first of these instances, Exodus 22:20–23, the 19th-century German rabbi Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes:

“The admonition against wronging the stranger is directed primarily to the State. The State must not practice ona’ah [wrong-doing] against the stranger: the State must not impose on him heavier taxes or grant him fewer rights than it grants the native-born, just because he is a stranger…Woe to the State whose widows and orphans suffer among the people, where even the official public representatives do not stand up for them and uphold their rights! … Woe unto you, if their only resort is to cry out to Me; [says God] for I will assuredly hear their cry. …if their weakest members must appeal to Me to find justice!” 

As aliens you were without any rights in Egypt, out of that grew all of your bondage and oppression, your slavery and wretchedness. Therefore beware, so runs the warning, from making rights in your own State conditional on anything other than on that simple humanity which every human being as such bears within. With any limitation in these human rights the gate is opened to the whole horror of Egyptian mishandling of human beings. 

As I mark this formative moment in my family’s history, I pray that this country will soon come to heed the words of our Torah, especially as Hirsch understood them. That our official public representatives will stand up for the rights of those who seek refuge at our borders. That we will close the gate of horror that has been open for far too long. And I pray that 75 years from now, descendants of today’s immigrants will be able to tell stories not dissimilar to my own, stories of finding a new home, trading statelessness for American-ness, and building lives filled with dignity and humanity.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Shuli Passow