18 – North of Boston
“Harry, we can’t say no,” Myrna Blumberg had shrieked after hanging up the telephone at 2 a.m. “They have no place to go. We can’t leave them out in the cold. Besides, everybody else is taking people in. We can’t be the only ones to say no.”
“But Myrna, they’re criminals. It’s against the law to hide them. We’ll get arrested,” Harry Blumberg, her husband, begged.
“Arrested shmested. What are they going to do, arrest every family on the block. Harry, do you want to be the only family at synagogue to say no? I’d be so ashamed. Besides, they said its only for a day or two until something more permanent comes up.”
The decision was made the way most decisions in the Blumberg family were made. Harry never actually agreed to take the Gorinskis into their house. He’d just stopped saying no.
The Gorinskis - father Oleg, mother Karin, and daughters Olga and Petka - were a nice enough family. They’d been in Israel all of two years, after moving there from Moscow. Oleg was a computer programmer who was fortunate to have obtained Russian exit visas for his family, since he worked on air defense radar software. He quickly found work with an Israeli electronics business working on air defense systems. The two daughters, ages 12 and 14, were excited to be in America, where they wanted to move in the first place, but were most excited about finally getting off that horrible stinking ship. They fought over who would get the first bath in the Blumberg’s Jacuzzi.
The “no more than two days” turned into a week, and the experience was rapidly getting old. Following the instructions from the Jewish Agency of the North Shore Emergency Organizing Committee representative who delivered the family, the Gorinskis remained inside the house. The Blumberg’s 15 year old son, Sam, was sworn to secrecy, which lasted almost half way through homeroom the following morning at school, where the teacher, aware of the rumors circulating among Marblehead High School’s large Jewish student body, came right out and asked for a show of hands, asking who took in refugees in the middle of the night. As hands were slowly raised, a good one-third of the students responded. Then, one after another, rather than raising their hands, they stood up, beaming, as their classmates applauded.
Helping refugees was a good thing, right? They were heroes. The kids who didn’t have refugees show up during the early morning felt as if they’d done something wrong.
All efforts at secrecy ceased within days of the sudden appearance of thousands of new cousins, uncles and aunts. Warnings to keep the new visitors carefully hidden indoors began to seem pointless. A quick trip to the mall couldn’t hurt. After all, these people needed clothes, didn’t they. And maybe a nice meal out, and a movie, how could a movie hurt?
Jewish families that turned down refugees, families that said no or slammed down the telephone when asked to take people in, had second thoughts. What kind of examples were these parents to their children, especially when it seemed that all of their friends had said yes. Refugee families quickly became commodities, transferred from house to house as offers came in volunteering to share the burden.
The secrecy quickly dissolved. The Salem Daily News ran interviews with Israeli refugees living in North Shore homes, changing names and addresses to protect the “secret locations” at which they were living.
A fund-raising rally to aid the refugees was organized five days after the escape. A Jewish community shell-shocked at the destruction of Israel, ashamed that their government did nothing to stop it and appeared to be buckling in to the demands of the triumphant Arab states, opened their wallets as they’d opened their homes.
A long-range resettlement committee was formed. It appeared that the escape of the passengers of the “Ionian Star” and the “Iliad” was a fait accompli.
Until the protests began.
The tone of newspaper editorials gradually changed from, “The government must seek a long term solution to this tragic problem,” to “We can not let one group take the law into their own hands and accomplish by lawlessness and violence what they could not accomplish by government action.” Boston’s Haitian community, stung by raids by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents and decimated by deportations of long time, but illegal, residents, led the first march on the John F. Kennedy Federal Building at Government Center in Boston.
“Deport White Illegals, Too,” the largest banner read. Henrique Depardieux, the chairman of the Massachusetts Haitian Rights Committee, made his point clearly.
“The INS knows where these people are staying. It knows they are here with no papers. It knows they broke the law to enter this country. Yet we see these people on the news every night being taken to shopping malls to buy new clothes. We see the Jews raising millions of dollars to give to these people. Why doesn’t the INS round them up the same way they rounded up my brothers and sisters?
“We will return here every day until every one of these white illegal immigrants is placed on the same airplanes that took black refugees away from us. We will not be stopped. We have suffered. Now it is time to prove to us that our suffering was not in vain, that this country treats blacks and whites alike.”
By the third day of demonstrations, the Haitians were in the minority. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans marched with them. They, too, had lost family members to deportation. A South Boston Irish contingent joined the demonstration, as did a small group of Chinese.
The South Boston group carried a different banner. They, of course, could not complain about different treatment for whites. Their uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who came to Boston from Cork and Galway, from Dublin and Donegal, looking for work after the Irish economic bubble burst, only to be rounded up and sent home when their tourist visas expired, were as white as the Jews from the two ships. The South Boston banner said,
“No Special Treatment for Jews.”
While these events took place, Howie Mandelbaum, the only person arrested at the scene the night of the sinkings, remained in the Charles Street Jail. He would not be alone for long.