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�We Too Were Strangers�
Alana Rosenbaum/Melbourne
Australian Jews demand a better deal for Muslim asylum-seekers -- but some worry that it may boomerang on their own intifada-stressed community.
ARNOLD ZABLE WOULD not be alive today if his mother had waited to enter Australia through the legal channels. A Melbourne-based writer and Yiddishist, Zable was born 55 years ago to Polish immigrants who were lucky to escape the gas chambers. His mother, Hadassah Zable, had been a Bundist, a singer with long black hair and dark eyes, who in 1933 smelled danger and booked a passage to Australia. It took her four years to persuade immigration officials to let her stay and to bring Arnold's father to join her.
More than half a century later, Arnold Zable was drawn to Maribyrnong Detention Center, a refugee facility in the outer suburbs of Melbourne surrounded by two cyclone fences topped with razor wire. He visits Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans and is frequently struck by parallels between their stories and his own refugee legacy. "Inside the detention centers I have heard many variations of my mother's story," he says. "I hear her voice amplified in the voices of the asylum-seekers. I hear the voices of our common humanity."
Zable is part of a newly formed Jewish lobby that protests the treatment of asylum-seekers and urges a better solution to Australia's refugee crisis than mandatory detention of adults and children.
There are seven detention centers on the Australian mainland and two leased off-shore -- in Nauru and New Guinea. They house around 3,000 asylum-seekers, most of whom are Muslims brought by sea by smugglers who extort thousands of dollars for a passage to Australia.
The detention centers fester with bitterness and disappointment. They have long been places of unrest, but this year tensions have been at an all time high. In late January, a mass uprising took place at Woomera in the South Australian outback, the largest of the mainland detention centers. Around 250 men went on week-long hunger strikes and threatened suicide if they weren't released. A similar revolt occurred in late March.
For some Jewish organizations that had not yet condemned the treatment of refugees, Woomera was a wake-up call. The President of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of Victoria, Chaim Gutnick, compared the government's treatment of asylum-seekers to the White Australia Policy, a racist immigration plan adopted in 1901 and dropped only in 1973. "As a Jew, it reminds me of what I lived through prior to the war and during the war. I have to plead with the government to help these people," Russian-born Rabbi Gutnick said.
But the strongest appeal came from the Union of Progressive Judaism, which put out a statement urging Australian political parties to formulate a more compassionate and equitable solution to the refugee problem. "Jewish tradition consistently teaches us to care for the stranger, to show justice to the stranger, to house and clothe the needy," it said. "Like the huge majority of Australians, all of us in the Jewish community were once strangers in a strange land."
The 110,000-strong community's official spokesbody, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, has also criticized mandatory detention and called for fair and benevolent treatment of refugees. Many other organizations have voiced their concern by allying themselves with Jews for Refugees, the communal group that seeks to provide a united Jewish front.
The group's founder, David Zyngier, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, believes that Jews have a pressing obligation to help those who have fled persecution. "Jews are instructed at Pesach to consider that we too were slaves in Egypt and that we too were once strangers in a strange land," he says. "Our heart goes out to these people who are fleeing their own pharoahs."
But amid the escalating crisis in Israel, not all Australian Jewry is supporting the refugee cause. Many fear that increased Muslim immigration could threaten the Jewish community, which has come under attack since the start of the intifada. In October 2000, a molotov cocktail was thrown at the home of Rabbi Feldman Pinchas, head of the Sydney Yeshivah, where 50 guests had gathered for Succot. In a similar incident soon afterwards, two home-made bombs were launched at the Jewish Center in the Australian capital, Canberra. Nobody was injured, but these attacks left a deep sense of insecurity.
DAYS AFTER THE INCIDENT in Canberra, police in Sydney prevented about 20 Palestinian demonstrators from storming the U.S. consulate during an anti-Israel protest. About 2,500 had staged a rally in the city center, shouting anti-Israel slogans and brandishing placards that read "Israel out of Palestine," and "Israel stop killing children now".
It was with these incidents in mind that Michael Burd, the son of a Holocaust survivor, wrote a letter to the weekly Australian Jewish News, criticizing the Jewish refugee lobby. "Each time the Middle East hots up, the anti-Semitic attacks and vandalism on Jewish property increase," he contended. "How can Jews wish to encourage more Middle Eastern refugees that come from countries that have indoctrinated these people to hate Jews? These same people may end up fire-bombing your synagogue or attacking your wife or children."
Arnold Zable turns the argument on its head: "The asylum-seekers I have met have never shown any animosity towards me, and they know I'm Jewish. In fact I would argue that Jews who have become refugee activists are helping to break down animosities. Can't we see that sooner or later we have to learn to live together?"
l (April 22, 2002)
Jewish World
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