To learn more about how you can get involved with Refugee and Immigration Advocacy contact Rabbi Ron Stern.

  • Deuteronomy 10: 19 You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
  • Leviticus 19:34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty have been, for countless Jewish immigrants, the symbol of a land of freedom and opportunity, a land that recognized the individual uniqueness of each citizen or immigrant and offered that person an invitation to join together to build a nation that celebrates diversity of belief, opinion, creed, and race even as we unite to affirm our democratic ideals.  Written by a Jewish poet, inscribed with pride by our nation’s leaders, we have always recognize that they are the aspirational hallmark of the best that America can embody for citizen and immigrant alike.

Because our parents and grandparents were immigrants, because they fled persecution in the lands of their birth, because they flocked to this country’s shores to embrace the vision of freedom embodied by our unique democratic ideals, because we are partners in the continuing realization of America’s greatness, and because we recognize that it is incumbent on us as shepherds of the Jewish people’s moral light unto the nations, we are compelled to speak out in vehement opposition and profound protest to President Trump’s recent executive order to ban members of a specific religious group from entry into this nation. While there has been implicit and overt bias against religious groups in this country, we have always looked back on those events with shame and recognized them for the dark stain on America’s virtue that they were. This is not the America that we strive to create nor is it a society that we endeavor to identify as our own.  Silence in the face of such an overt violation of our principles as Americans and Jewish leaders is unthinkable and we refuse to remain indifferent.

Having said this, we recognize that the safety of the American homeland is a national imperative and the security of our nation is paramount.  We support all legal and moral efforts and policies that seek to protect this country and, at the same time, uphold America’s core values.

Recognizing this, we the undersigned clergy of Stephen Wise Temple pledge ourselves to protest in word and deed any and all executive orders, congressional legislation, or judicial decisions that undermine the fabric of liberty that is the true embodiment of America’s vision of freedom, democracy and most importantly safe haven for the world’s storm tossed refugees.