"About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building's Haitian staff in their apartments. "That reminds me of Anne Frank," Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "There's a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.""
"My father died in the small hours of the morning after a prolonged battle with Alzheimer's. I had taken to sleeping in a chair next to his bed for the previous week. While I waited for the funeral home workers to pick up his body, one by one, or in small groups, the attendants at the facility stopped by to pay respects. Many of them were Haitians, saying prayers for my father in a kind of musical Creole."
"These people contributed more to American society on the average workday than has been contributed by the entire worthless Trump family has since it washed up on these shores like the red tide decades ago. But there are deeper political echoes than my personal ones in play here. Between 1938 and the early 1940s, while the United States was pretending it didn't know what was going on in Europe, Haiti took in several hundred Jewish refugees, ultimately saving their lives."
About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, including many Holocaust survivors who offered to shelter the building's Haitian staff. The seniors drew parallels between their own refugee experiences and the Haitians' vulnerability after the Trump administration moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for several countries. A personal account describes Haitian attendants praying for a dying elder and the deep bonds formed through caregiving. Haiti accepted several hundred Jewish refugees between 1938 and the early 1940s, ultimately saving their lives. Seniors empathize with the prospect of being unwelcome and express a desire to protect vulnerable staff.
Read at Esquire
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