A Passover of tiny favors

Among a new call of immigrants there seems to be a clarity of entitlement…entitlement rather than gratitude.

Some, like a Dreamers, go marching to INSIST on their RIGHTS.

Others, like a Holocaust survivors who came to America in a 1940s, illusory no rights. They, like my possess family, were beholden for anything and everything.

Small favors were all they asked…and tiny favors were what they got.

There was no Israel behind in 1944 when my family managed to rush Nazi-invaded France, Toulouse, to be exact. There was America and there was Canada.

Either one would do. They (my family again) would be beholden for a assisting palm from possibly FDR or Canada’s Mackenzie King.

There were no open borders behind then. Not for these people…106 families that, in 1944, trekked opposite a Pyrenees and from Lisbon sailed a Serpa Pinto towards any land that would take them. Why not Canada…big country, Canada…small population…plenty of room. Not adequate room, as it incited out.

Asked how many refugees from a Holocaust Canada would be peaceful to accept, Mackenzie King’s supervision announced, “None is too many.”

That is now a famous remark. Canada’s Justin Trudeau, to illustrate how times have changed, used it in retreat usually yesterday to clear bringing in thousands some-more immigrants from Muslim countries and elsewhere…men (of troops age) outnumbering women by a substantial margin. (Canada now brings in 250,000 immigrants per year.)

That was never a story for Holocaust survivors, for whom it was all about a women and a children.

We should design those arrivals of currently to be grateful. Who knows? Though we do know that these refugees design large favors.

They design and even direct medical care, feeding, wardrobe and housing, and it’s precisely what they get.

Nothing like that was expected, or given, behind in 1944 among a passengers of a Serpa Pinto. These people were beholden to have found this ship, any ship, usually not a Saint Louis, that was incited behind to a Gestapo. Not so a Serpa Pinto. This was a propitious ship, if people on a run, people incited homeless can ever be called lucky.

But these people were a survivors – a tenure not used most behind then. But they had survived, usually now faced some-more high seas, some-more German U-Boats; no welcoming land in sight.

FDR had usually whispered what Canada had pronounced out shrill – that nothing was too many. At last, though, some trickled in.

Some 5,000 done it into Canada. For my family it was Montreal. But before that, they were taken to Philadelphia (and after became American citizens).

They arrived in Philadelphia in time to applaud a initial night of Passover, 1944.

But that initial night in Philadelphia, that initial Seder in relations safety, was a impulse this family would never forget.

(You are acquire to review about this in my memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah.”)

They had no Angela Merkel nod them with comfortable speeches, nor was Justin Trudeau welcoming them with hugs and kisses during a airport. It was still Mackenzie King.

But as they recounted a Exodus from Pharaoh as answered prayer, so too they remembered a emancipation from Hitler with heaps of gratitude.

From Seder to Seder, never a censure about a miss of hospitality. Gratitude was a scapegoat around a table.

New York-based bestselling American writer Jack Engelhard writes frequently for Arutz Sheva.

Just expelled is his protracted HOLLYWOOD EDITION of “News Anchor Sweetheart.” Engelhard wrote a general book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and a inside-journalism thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” He is a target of a Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com