In appreciation of the work of Rabbi David Mason and his colleagues at HIAS-JCORE

It’s different when it’s around your kitchen table. I come from a family who were refugees, my father at the age of sixteen, my mother at twenty. On both sides, there were others who weren’t so lucky. We hold visceral intergenerational memories of how all that was. So now we host refugees though Refugees at Home. We were once in their place and people helped us; today we try to support others, uncomfortably conscious that, who knows, it may be their grandchildren who come to the rescue of ours.

It’s months before we ask Z: ‘How did you get here?’ It’s not that we didn’t care, but that it would have been too close to the nerve. We waited until we sensed he felt safe enough: ‘I was in Calais.’ ‘The Jungle?’ ‘Yes, the Jungle. I clung to the underside of a lorry.’ He’s tall and strong. He works hard, determined to make his way and contribute to this country. On Mother’s Day he turns up with a bunch of flowers for my wife: ‘You’re like my mother now. You are my parents in this country.’ Several who’ve stayed in our home tell us that. I feel ashamed.

D, however, wants us to know his story. He’s glad to talk. ‘I told my little brother, “Don’t come. There’s dangers. You won’t make it; you’ll die.” He’s too young, not strong enough, D explains to us. ‘So how did you manage?’ ‘I walked and walked. We crossed the Sahara with people who take you on the lorry. One bottle of water all day. I see dead people. I help this woman. We carry her child, then I see he’s not living any more. In Libya we wait for a small boat. I don’t go. I’m alone. If storms happen and you don’t have family, they throw you first in the water. There’s only sea, sea, sea, nothing. You drown. In the end I find a friend; we make a pact. We go together. The boat, it was for Italy; it floats to Greece. I walk, I walk and walk until I can no more. A nice man brings me food…’ Months later his feet have still not healed.

And now that you’re here? ‘I want to study.’ We hear it from all these young men. They want to have a life, a future. ‘This is my home now. I want to do something good. For me, for all.’ Meanwhile he works in a food outlet. But they treat him badly, don’t pay what they promise, send him home after telling him to turn up in a hurry, make him clean out the toilets. ‘I can complain for you,’ I say. ‘I can write to the papers?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘No. Make no trouble. I want no trouble…’ A year later he still works there; they still treat him like dirt.

‘What about your family?’ we ask T, ‘Your mother?’ ‘She was killed.’ ‘Your brother?’ ‘I saw him killed.’ ‘Your father?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Can no one help you find him? The Red Cross?’ ‘No. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe they put him in prison. Nobody knows. Twelve years, I hear nothing. Nobody knows.’ Our dog looks up at him; he throws her a ball. They adore each other, those two. At least, he has a new friend. When he comes to visit after finding work and moving out to accommodation of his own, the dog is at the door wagging not just her tail but three-quarters of her body. They play football in the garden for an hour. The dog’s his family now. On January first, he what’s apps to us: ‘Happy New Year, my lovely family.’ Our hearts ache.

Refugee Tales campaigns against indefinite detention of asylum seekers. They’re based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, sharing stories while walking, so every year they arrange a pilgrimage, with cooking, meals together, music and talking along the way. They match refugees with writers tasked to tell their stories. The organisers understand, explains their patron Ali Smith,

That if they matched the people whose voices were being denied or unheard with contemporary writers – in other words, with people whose preoccupation is listening for and working with voice and language – something freeing might happened for silenced and detained people. (The Observer, 6 July 2025)

B. is a grandmother from the Ukraine. She stays with us together with her daughter and two grandchildren. B. has almost no English. But we know that back in Ukraine she has some land where she grew food, so we take a book ‘How to grow your own,’ and look at the pictures. With her daughter’s sprinkling of English, with signs and pointing and acting, we manage to understand one another. Apricots: we had seven, nine, ten, thirteen. Three big, others small. Apples. Plums. The grandmother gestures, opening her arms between which joy has escaped. Bombi, she says, and looks up at the ceiling as if it were the sky, then sweeps her hands across the table as if to swipe away everything. Bombi; all destroyed. We hear the grief. And she’s so far from home. And home has gone. I think of my grandparents, after they fled to Britain from Nazi Germany. Like them from now on, unless peace comes and she can return home, she’ll be living here in exile, and simultaneously somewhere else. Her daily world, her memory world, her heart’s world; they’ll never again be in the same place.

What do we say? What can we say, who have lived none of this? But it’s not about what we say. It’s about how we hear. All these people who’ve lost their place, the home where their childhood is, the scents and seasons, their language, their friends, they need to know, they need to feel – because there’s no way of saying it just with words – that their stories have roots in our hearts.

That doesn’t mean that one’s contemptuous about the issues. There’s a shortage of housing in the UK; people born in the Britain can’t find homes they can afford. There’s childhood poverty. The National Health Service can hardly cope. There’s national debt. There’s fear for jobs. And, it’s true, from time to time there are immigrants, as there are citizens, who commit horrible crimes and a few who bring their entrenched hatreds with them.

But once one’s listened at one’s table, one doesn’t say ‘swarms.’ One doesn’t join gangs chanting abuse outside hotels where, for want of anywhere else, refugees are lodged. One doesn’t say: ‘Deport thousands, tens of thousands; serves them right.’ One doesn’t vomit into the social media sewers.

Rather, one holds their stories in one’s heart. One thinks: these people know suffering, They know loneliness and fear in ways I never have. One realises, ‘This could, one terrible, not unthinkable, day, be my children or me.’

One respects these people; they’re resilient. One’s heart goes out to them.

Refugees

I guess it’s the wrong kind of love I’m writing about on the eve of Valentine’s Day (though note: the equivalent Jewish date is Tu Be’Av, the 15^th of the month of Menachem Av). I’m focussing with deep concern on the love most frequently mentioned in the Torah: love for the ger, the stranger, the outsider, the refugee. A better word than ‘love’ might be compassion, empathy, concern.

I will never forget being taken on Lesbos, at the peak of the small boat crossings from Turkey, to a half-hidden cemetery where a compassionate Muslim carer had, of his own initiative, laid to rest the bodies of the drowned. Many of the graves were of children, mostly nameless. Who was left to cradle them to their last resting place, who had known their names and loved them?

The injunction is this week’s Torah portion does not include the word ‘love’ though it is employed in this context numerous times elsewhere:

You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:20)

Don’t attribute to others the injuries from which you yourself suffer,’ insists Rashi. This may mean: Don’t maltreat outsiders, because not long ago you were an outsider yourself, and why draw attention to your own vulnerability? Alternatively, he may mean: You know how it hurts to be a refugee, so don’t go hurting others. That’s why Jewish communities have been deeply committed to the fate of those who, like our parents, had to flee for their lives.

We’ve hosted many people through the excellent NGO Refugees at Home. You hear it differently when it’s the person opposite you at your kitchen table who says: ‘They gave me one bottle of water to cross the Sahara; I saw many dead.’ ‘The tiny boat drifted to Greece; I walked until I couldn’t move.’ ‘I clung underneath the lorry.’ ‘Where would you sleep if we hadn’t had a room?’ ‘On the bus; I buy a ticket for the longest journey, then buy another back.’ When you hear such stories, you don’t use words like ‘swarms.’ You don’t build your true British identity on contempt for others, especially if you are a Jew, or, for that matter, a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh.

No country can, or should, accept everyone. Rashi’s fellow commentator, Abraham ibn Ezra, has a caution: before being accepted, refugees must reject idolatry. This is a fundamental rule applicable to all children of Noah: idol worship must be foresworn. The equivalent precondition today might be commitment to equality and democracy. But given that stipulation, ibn Ezra continues, not only is a society which oppresses refugees culpable, but any individual within it who witnesses such maltreatment and remains silent is held responsible for their community’s wrongdoing. There’s a duty to speak out against cruelty and contempt.

But no commentator could be more forthright than Samson Raphael Hirsch:

As strangers you were without rights in Egypt; out of that grew your slavery and suffering. Beware therefore, so runs the warning, lest in your state you make the rights of anyone dependent on anything other than the simple fact of their humanity, which every human being possesses by virtue of being human.

His words chime painfully with those of Ali Smith, president of the remarkable organisation Refugee Tales, in which, based on the precedent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, people from all areas of life walk, eat and share their stories together. The group, she writes,

is a small bright spot in a decade of tortuous pressure – legally, politically and in terms of public rhetoric – on the people forced by war, environmental ruin, poverty and fear into exile and crossing the world with something like hope in humanity.

That ‘something like hope in humanity’ is what the Torah enjoins us to uphold.