For me, it was those little blue shoes. In the picture of little Alan Kurdi, laying there like he was sleeping on the beach in Turkey. Only he wasn\u2019t sleeping, I had been sleeping, we have been sleeping.<\/p>\n
It was the shoes that woke me from my slumber, from my disregard for the suffering of the Syrian people in the midst of the greatest humanitarian refugee crisis since the Second World War. More than 10 million people have fled from chaos \u2026 into chaos. There are 360,000 refugee children under the age of 11 in Turkey alone.<\/p>\n
But it only took one. It was those tiny shoes, on those tiny feet, with their tiny toes. I know those shoes, those feet, those toes, my own children have them. They should not be laying there lifeless on the beach \u2013 they should be running through sandcastles, stomping in puddles, chasing the tide in and out.<\/p>\n
Two hundred thousand people have died in the fighting, or while running or swimming for their lives, many of them children like Alan and his brother Galib. Millions of children are suffering from trauma and ill health. A quarter of Syria\u2019s schools have been damaged, destroyed or taken over for shelter. More than half of Syria\u2019s hospitals are destroyed.<\/p>\n
But \u201cit\u2019s the children that catch us,\u201d wrote Sarah Wildman for the Jewish Daily Forward<\/em>. It\u2019s the children who \u201cbring those dizzying numbers into full focus. Their eyes round, their faces tired or hidden behind a parent\u2019s legs. They are asleep on their parents\u2019 shoulders; they walk beside them or are strapped to their bellies, legs dangling, as their mothers or fathers stride ever forward.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are far younger than the Syrian conflict so many of them flee. They have been trapped the entirety of their young lives, and now we see them, lying lifeless on beaches.\u201d<\/p>\n Jonathan Sacks, Britain\u2019s former chief rabbi, wrote: \u201cI used to think that the most important line in the Bible was \u2018love your neighbor as yourself.\u2019 Then I realized that it is easy to love your neighbor because he or she is usually quite like yourself. What is hard \u2013 is to love the stranger, one whose color, culture or creed is different from yours. That is why the command \u2018Love the stranger because you were once strangers\u2019 resonates so often throughout the Bible. It is summoning us now.\u201d<\/p>\n Sacks suggests a modern-day kindertransport, like that which was organized to save Jewish children on the eve of the Shoah.<\/p>\n But \u201csave the children\u201d is not \u201clove the stranger.\u201d To love the stranger, you have to take the parents, too. To love the stranger, you have to love the Syrians, who were taught to fear and hate Israel, to fear and hate Jews.<\/p>\n \u201cLove the stranger\u201d does not mean you have to open wide the borders to Islamists, fundamentalists or terrorists. But, in these numbers the world is dealing with, how many innocents will die while we carefully screen for the next Osama bin Laden?<\/p>\n I hear the concern, the alarm, the plaintive note of caution in our community and beyond.<\/p>\n \u201cThink before acting.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a Muslim problem, let those countries come to their aid. They hate us anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAllowing millions of Syrians and others from the Muslim Middle East into Europe will end up as a catastrophe for Europe and, therefore, for the West.\u201d<\/p>\n I read these statements and I can\u2019t help swapping the word Muslim for Jew. Re-read them that way and they are indistinguishable from the statements that were issued when it was our people, the Jewish people, trying desperately to get out of Europe ahead of the Nazi menace.<\/p>\n Jews were desperate to leave. Yet country after country shut its doors. Nation after nation, in effect, said it wasn\u2019t their problem. Or, more precisely, said they didn\u2019t want it to be their problem.<\/p>\n We know well the tragedy of the St. Louis, one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany in 1939 before Europe became involved in the Second World War. Denied entry at every port from Cuba, to the United States, to Canada, the ship sailed back to Europe and the Jewish passengers ended up in Nazi concentration camps, a third of them died there.<\/p>\n We know the infamous response of an unidentified Canadian immigration agent who, in early 1945, was asked how many Jews would be allowed in Canada after the war. He replied, \u201cNone is too many.\u201d<\/p>\n This is not the Shoah, thank God.<\/p>\n What\u2019s happening in Europe is a humanitarian crisis of the first order, but it\u2019s not genocide. It shouldn\u2019t need to be said that the Holocaust was the determined effort by one of the world\u2019s leading industrialized powers to murder all the world\u2019s Jews in the course of a nearly successful effort to conquer the globe.<\/p>\n Raising images of the Holocaust may help draw attention to the crisis. But it also shuts down reasoned discourse, and thus drowns out urgent questions that need airing.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the borders are opened wide, how many millions will want to flee the world\u2019s no-longer-liveable regions for the safe haven of a continent that works?\u201d<\/p>\n Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, rightfully, reminds us that Israel is a small country that lacks geographic and demographic depth \u2013 it cannot take in masses of Syrian refugees. Yet Israel is not standing idly by. Quietly, so as not to endanger those it is helping, Israel is treating hundreds of Syrian wounded on its northern border.<\/p>\n \u201cBut,\u201d as J.J. Goldberg wrote in the Forward<\/em>, \u201cin an atmosphere where every dinghy is the St. Louis, where refrigerator trucks smuggling migrants into Austria become boxcars transporting Jews to the gas chambers, where numbers thoughtlessly scrawled on refugees\u2019 forearms in felt-tip pen by Czech police frantically trying to keep track of the human tidal wave are transformed into numbers tattooed on death-camp inmates \u2013 in such an atmosphere, there\u2019s nothing left to discuss.\u201d<\/p>\n Is Canada the best place for Syrian refugees? No, it would be better to keep them near their homeland so that, when troubles are over, they are in position to return to rebuild. Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have taken in two million; the rest of the oil-rich Gulf States have refused \u2013 they need to do their part.<\/p>\n But, as Irwin Cotler reminded us at the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver campaign launch, quoting Rabbi Tarfon from the Mishnah (2:16): \u201cIt is not our responsibility to finish the work [of repairing the world], but we are not free to desist from it either.\u201d<\/p>\n On the Thursday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Sept. 17), five Vancouver synagogues, their rabbis and lay leaders met with the Jewish Federation and our interfaith partners in the Anglican Diocese and the immigrant aid service agency<\/p>\n MOSAIC to explore the possibility of each synagogue sponsoring a refugee family. We will meet again after the federal elections to continue our planning and due diligence in preparation for family sponsorships.<\/p>\n This will not be a small project. We will be responsible not only for raising enough money to show the Canadian government that we can support a family for a year; we will also be responsible for everything from meeting them at the airport to finding them a place to live, from helping them learn English to helping them find work and schools. If you are interested in getting involved, I urge you to contact your rabbi or the Jewish Federation and offer your support to those who are in desperate need.<\/p>\n We will be responsible long after their images and stories have disappeared from the headlines of our news. But we will stand together with other synagogues \u2013 and people of other faiths \u2013 across North America, stepping forward to do what we can, to love the stranger because we were once strangers.<\/p>\n