#CloseTheCamps- San Diego Jewish Activists Join Nationwide Vigils and Protests
Personal Note: This story was published earlier today with a different headline. Unbeknownst to me that headline contained a hashtag local activist groups took offense to. I'm led to understand the phrase is being used by a competing group hostile to local organizers.
I hate taking stories down. It's like cheating the internet and just doesn't feel right. So my compromise was to write this intro. so readers would have my point of view. And I apologize to those who you who may have clicked on the earlier link and saw a 'page not found' message.
A vigil on Mission Bay and a protest at Otay Mesa Detention Center were local responses to a nationwide call by Jewish groups and supporters to protest the treatment of immigrants by the Trump administration.
At more than 50 locations from coast to coast, Tisha B’Av-- traditionally a day when Jews fast and remember the destruction of two ancient temples and other disasters suffered by their community-- communities gathered to mourn both past and present injustices. Calls were made urging closing the detention centers, ending family separation, and abolishing ICE.
Rabbis from San Diego synagogues gathered at Mission Bay on Sunday morning to give a prayerful service for Tisha B'Av.
In the afternoon, roughly 30 people calling themselves San Diego Jewish Action gathered in front of the Otay Mesa CoreCivic detention facility for a peaceful protest, chanting and hearing return chants by the people held in the facility.
They sang traditional songs in English and Hebrew. For many, they or their relatives had escaped persecution and violence in the Holocaust, pogroms in Russia, or Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Iran, and feel a personal connection to people seeking asylum.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1160655537513664512?s=20
Nationally the effort was led by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, with a host of supporting Jewish sponsors including Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, the National Council of Jewish Women, J Street, The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, HIAS and Torah Trumps Hate.
“When we think of the core tragedies of Tisha B’Av, namely the destruction of the two temples, we think of the destruction of communities and we think about families who were ripped apart in that trauma,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah. “It should move us into working for a world in which we don’t have communities that are attacked because of their identities or where family members are killed or (families are) ripped apart or forced to leave their homes.”
In New York protesters demanding Amazon Web Services end its cloud computing contracts with U.S. Customs and Enforcement occupied the Amazon Books store in Manhattan. Dozens of people were arrested and transported to jail via a city bus commandeered by police.
Rabbi Salem Pearce was interviewed for Tablet Magazine:
...the same rhetoric that was once used about Jews is now being used to demonize other communities: “Words like ‘vermin,’ ‘lack of moral values,’ threats to the ‘native’ population, ‘outsiders …” She trailed off. Indeed, a statement by an anti-immigration spokesman in the 1940s sounds awfully familiar: “Two hundred thousand Communist Jews [are] at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country. If they are admitted, they will rape every woman and child that is left unprotected.”
From Religion News:
Planning for the vigils was already underway before this weekend’s massacre in El Paso, in which a gunman who had railed against Hispanics and immigrants in a racist screed killed 22 people at a Walmart.
The cause of immigration and especially refugees speaks profoundly to Jews because so many have experiences of parents or grandparents fleeing persecution. This summer, a Twitter account created by Jewish educator Russel Neiss went viral, with photos and names of Jewish refugees who sailed on the St. Louis from Hamburg, Germany, in 1939, only to be turned away from U.S. shores since they didn’t have immigration visas. The ship returned to Germany where many perished in Nazi concentration camps.
https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/1151964887456727041?s=20
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Immigration Pop Quiz
How Many Employers Have Been Prosecuted for Hiring Undocumented Workers in 2019?
5
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Answer (Click for reference, if you really need to.)
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A Shout Out to Emily Green and Ylime Neerg for their assistance in putting together this story.