Fulfilling a Mitzvah
Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS
By Mark Wischnitzer
World. 286 pp. $4.00.

In his message to Congress vetoing the McCarran-Walter bill—which was then passed over the veto to become the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—Harry Truman affirmed that in recent years American immigration policy had become a matter of major national concern. “What we do in the field of immigration and naturalization is vital to the continued growth and internal development of the United States—to the economic and social strength of our country. . . . Our immigration policy is equally, if not more, important to the conduct of our foreign relations and to our responsibilities of moral leadership in the struggle for world peace.” President Truman told Congress that the McCarran-Walter measure would perpetuate injustices against many nations of the world by confirming the discriminatory national-origins quota system that had been put into effect in 1929, and that under the terms of the new bill immigration would not keep up with the manpower needs of our economy.

These charges, supported by over six hundred persons and organizations that presented evidence before President Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, were summed up in the Commission’s report, Whom We Shall Welcome. This report was released by Truman as he turned over his office to Dwight Eisenhower.

Although our immigration policy affected many nations and peoples in all parts of the world as well as Americans themselves, it was Jewish scholars, Jewish leaders, and Jewish organizations who provided much of the factual data and reasoning that disclosed its stupidity and injustice. Of particular importance were the contributions of Senator Herbert H. Lehman, the late Felix S. Cohen (especially through the memorandum he prepared for the American Jewish Committee, Americanizing Our Immigration Laws), and Harry N. Rosen-field, a member of the Displaced Persons Commission and Executive Director of the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization.

President Eisenhower, touching on immigration policy in his first State of the Union Message, told Congress and the nation that “Existing legislation contains injustices. It does, in fact, discriminate.” Early this year he called upon Congress to enact a liberalized immigration law, and subsequently a bill was introduced under whose terms the annual usable quota of about 90,000 would be increased to about 300,000 by abolishing mortgaged quotas, pooling unused quotas, and shifting the emphasis from British, Irish, and German immigration to immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

While every American who wants a fair immigration policy adopted should support the pending legislation, it should also be kept in mind that the administration bill, if and when enacted, will accomplish little for the Jews of Europe and Asia. The remedy will come too late for those millions of Jews whose failure to find refuge cost them their lives.

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One cannot help but read Visas to Freedom: the History of HIAS with this tragic fact in mind. The book is the sober story of the rescue work accomplished over the past seven decades by the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigration Aid Society, now officially the United HIAS Service, but always and universally known as HIAS. It was written by Professor Mark Wischnitzer, who died in 1955 at the age of seventy-three.

The jacket calls the story of HIAS “dramatic,” but the drama is in the material and not in the telling—the book itself is altogether factual and statistical. This is as it should be. The reader himself will bring to the book his own sense of drama. All that is needed are the raw facts, and these Dr. Wischnitzer provides, with skill and a nice sense of proportion.

I recall that only twenty or twenty-five years ago almost every American city with a Jewish community had a hachnoses orchim, a house of shelter for the wayfaring Jew, a diminutive HIAS to serve as a nachtlager. For the Jew had learned from the Torah that he must love and take care of the stranger, and from the Mishnah that hospitality to wayfarers is one of the mitzvot (commandments) the fruits of which he enjoys in this world, even while the stock remains for him for the world to come. Since the mitzvah of hospitality toward the stranger offered the Jew enjoyment of both worlds, no deed was performed with more alacrity and personal concern.

HIAS symbolized this basic commandment for the American Jewish community. As the boats with their human cargo reached our shores, HIAS representatives—really representing Jewish immigrants who themselves had come to this country only a relatively short time before—met them and guided the newcomers past the government inspectors, provided them with shelter and food, and helped them find relatives and jobs. Who can measure the help to human beings that was involved in acts summarized in skeleton form by a statement such as the following? “HIAS representatives met 703 boats bearing Jewish immigrants in 1937, and 955 boats in 1938; 21,768 nights of lodging and 189,208 meals were offered in the Shelter in 1937; and 27,305 nights of lodging and 210,208 meals in 1938; 19,337 affidavits [to help bring in relatives] were drawn up in 1937, and 37,666 in 1938.”

It is related that a man came and complained to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov that he could not fulfill the commandment of hospitality because his wife did not like to have strangers in the house, and that whenever he brought one she quarreled with him. What, asked the poor man, could he do to fulfill the commandment? The rabbi quoted to him the saying of the Jewish sages that welcoming strangers is a greater virtue than welcoming the Sh’chinah (Divine Presence). The Sh’chinah rests in a home where there is peace. But welcoming a stranger is a greater virtue even than welcoming the Sh’chinah. “Even if hospitality destroys the peace of the home,” concluded Rabbi Menachem Mendel, “the commandment to be hospitable is still the greater one.”

The work of HIAS still is, and will continue to be, important, and even indispensable, fulfilling the commandment of hospitality; but there will never again be a time when Jewish immigration to this country will reach high figures. Visas to Freedom belongs to the past in more ways than one as a history of a humanitarian endeavor and of a traditional mitzvah fulfilled in a typically Jewish way—through community organization and responsibility that combined efficiency and planning without sacrificing personal concern and commitment.

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