Blog

Ben Arkes was born in Chicago in 1922. His father, Pinches, was a Ukrainian immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1910 with no resources and limited English proficiency. Ben was one of five children, and though his father was an incredibly hard-working man, the family struggled with poverty, often going without meals. His upbringing had a profound impact on Ben’s altruism later in life.

Like many things in the world, life happens by chance, but with purpose. Igor Litvak, a HIAS Immigration & Citizenship caseworker recently recalled such an experience at the volunteer driven workshop he attended to assist Russian speaking Holocaust survivors. They were filing for restitution for the suffering they endured during WWII.

Jessica Schaffer, Director of HIAS Chicago, recently attended an immigration action rally led by JCUA and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at Federal Plaza. The rally was in support of immigration reform, specifically asking legislators to pass permanent solutions for DACA and TPS recipients.

By David Rupp, Social Work Graduate Student and Intern, JCFS Chicago

The 2020/2021 HIAS Immigration & Citizenship College Scholarship Program is officially live! Applications are available to download through the submission deadline of February 1, 2020.

For over a decade, HIAS Immigration & Citizenship has had the honor of providing scholarships for Jewish students whose lives have been touched by our organization directly, or through their parents or grandparents.

by Jessica Schaffer, HIAS Immigration & Citizenship Director

Today, over 65 million people are displaced around the world – of those, more than 25 million are refugees. Various conflicts across the globe, including in Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, have created the greatest humanitarian crisis the world has seen since World War II.  In the face of this crisis, many countries and states and institutions have closed or threatened to close their doors to refugees, unable or unwilling to provide the critical support necessary to help them rebuild their lives.

by Jessica Schaffer, Director of HIAS Immigration & Citizenship

In 1949, my grandparents, like so many thousands of Jews at the time, arrived in Canada as refugees. They had survived the ghettos and concentrations camps of Poland and Germany and were grateful for the opportunity to build a new, quiet life in a welcoming community. With them was my mother, only two years old at the time. Though she didn’t know the same horrors as my grandparents, she did know the feeling of containment in the Bergen Belsen Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, in which she was born and spent the first years of her life. For her, my grandparents wished a bright, safe future. They wanted her to grow roots in a country that accepted her and that she could call home.