By Eli Bass Director of Jewish Life
In France people rallied to send a statue, a gift, to the United States, a 100-year-old country that embodied the liberal democratic values of France. France and the United States were friends and this was a symbol of our shared values.
The statue arrived in 1885 with 200,000 people standing on the docks welcoming the unassembled pieces. In the United States, funders raised $102,000 for construction of the statue and pedestal from 120,000 donors. Most donations were less than a dollar.
The statue campaign asked a poet named Emma Lazarus to commission a poem to support raising money for the pedestal. She reluctantly agreed.
Lazarus was a wealthy American Jew whose family had been in the United States since the establishment of the country. Because of her Jewish heritage, she also could not ignore what was happening in Europe. The assassination of Tzar Alexander II in 1881 resulted in massive pogroms. Pogroms are sweeping attacks, which specifically target Jews.
Over the course of the next 30 years, each of my great-grandparents joined many other Jews fleeing Europe traveling by boat to the United States. This European migration forms the large majority of the American Jewish population. The 1924 immigration quotas made it extremely difficult for Europe’s Jews to escape and ended this period of massive immigration. A large majority of this remaining population were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust.
Emma Lazarus saw the plight of these Jewish migrants and knew she wanted to become involved. In addition to creating this poem, she created charities to handle aid for arriving immigrants. The creation of “The New Colossus” was a statement of American values for immigrants.
Lazarus changed the meaning of a statue that recognizes national friendship into a symbol of welcoming the most vulnerable. Last weekend I took students to a rally on immigration in Harrisburg. The statue of Liberty and the words of “The New Colossus” surrounded me. It is a central piece of what it means to be American. I included her poem in its entirety.
The New Colossus—
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp.’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’”
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