Of Note -- Individual Reflections

Posted by Gideon Aronoff on Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 16:44 pm

As the Talmud teaches, “To save one life is to save the entire world and to take one life is to annihilate the entire world.” (Sanhedrin 37a).

While HIAS is proud of our ability to make a difference on a massive scale – hundreds of thousand or millions saved, protected, assisted, resettled, served – I find it powerful at times to stop and think about the individuals – the single lives – that HIAS touches on a daily basis.

This month I

Of Note -- Hearts, Minds & HIAS

Posted by Gideon Aronoff on Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 16:36 pm

You may have recently seen an ad in the Forward, NY Jewish Week and probably other Jewish papers from Stephen Steinlight asking if immigration is good for America and good for the Jews. Steinlight, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is a leading “light” in the immigration restrictionist movement. His primary goal is to convince grassroots American Jews that elite Jewish leaders – that is to say HIAS and our colleagues in the Jewish immigrant rights movement (AJCommittee,

Of Note -- Jewish Communities in Distress, Jewish Values in Action

Posted by Gideon Aronoff on Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 15:02 pm

I have just recently returned from a trip with Jerry Teller, Allan Rodolitz, Marc Silberberg, and Mark Hetfield to Venezuela and Ecuador. The mission was packed with important meetings with Jewish community leaders, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) officials, NGO colleagues, and government officials. While we will present a full report on what we learned at the next meeting of the Board, I wanted to provide a few quick observations that I came away with on the compelling role