Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:
The Zionist Organization of America strongly criticizes the mostly far-left wing Jewish groups who sent a letter to President Trump opposing deporting unvetted criminal aliens even though this morally necessary action protects Americans and American Jews from potential acts of violence, rape and murder. These groups, from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstruction movements to J Street, Truah, Bend the Arc, HIAS, NCJW and JCRCs are dangerously opposing an important moral Jewish and American value. The ZOA strongly supports President Trump’s policy on illegal aliens, many of whom come from countries whose people and government are hostile to the Jewish State and are frequently antisemitic.
As ZOA has often explained, “Pikuach Nefesh” – preserving life – is a preeminent Jewish value, which trumps most other Jewish laws. The Torah commands: “Take heed and carefully guard your lives.” (Deuteronomy 4:9 and 4:15). Before his death, Moses blessed the Jewish people with a prayer for strong borders “sealed like iron and copper” to enable the people to live “securely” into healthy “old age.” (Deuteronomy 33:25, 28.)
Furthermore, keeping all Americans safe is “Job One” of a responsible U.S. president.
The need to deport unvetted criminal aliens is especially pressing in light of the rampant violent antisemitism on American college campuses and streets, much of it carried out by Jew-hating foreigners, Islamists and foreign students. On our campuses, Jewish students have been attacked with bottles, jabbed in the eye with a flagpole, blocked from attending classes and from walking across college quads, hit in the head with a megaphone (breaking the Jewish student’s nose) and confronted with daily calls to “globalize the Intifada” – meaning, to kill every Jew. (See ZOA letter to Attny Gen’l Garland et al describing multiple incidents.) As Eli Wiesel proclaimed, “If they say they want to kill you, believe them!”
No rational reading of Jewish law places foreign attackers’ freedom from deportation above the safety of our students, or above the lives of future Laken Rileys, a nursing student murdered by an unvetted criminal illegal alien.
Jews continue to be the most vulnerable religious group in the nation. The recent (2023) FBI data reveals that 67.8% of religion-based hate crimes targeted Jews.
It is thus downright dangerous that a group of far-left extremist Jewish organizations (J Street; T’ruah; Bend the Arc, etc.), accompanied by groups such as left wing HIAS (a resettlement agency which receives huge government grants to settle immigrants, legal and illegal – now disproportionately Muslims, whom polls show are mostly antisemitic) into the U.S., the left wing Union of Reform Judaism (URJ), far-left Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the Left/Center Conservative Judaism Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, left wing National Council of Jewish Women (many of these groups defended the Israel-bashing, antisemitic, violent, Black Lives Matter organization as “the civil rights movement of our time”) and eight cities’ mostly left wing JCRCs, signed a letter wrongly accusing the Trump administration of planning “widespread persecution of immigrants.” Removing unvetted illegal immigrants who pose a danger to Americans is not “persecution of immigrants.”
We hope that the groups who signed this letter will come to appreciate the danger that their position poses to their fellow Jewish Americans and all Americans, and will change course.
For some of ZOA’s prior descriptions as to why carefully vetting immigrants, enforcing immigration laws, and strong border controls, etc. are moral and necessary, see:
- “Brief Amicus Curiae by The Zionist Organization Of America (Zoa) In Support of Petitioners Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, et al,” in Trump v. Hawaii, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 17-865
- “ZOA Opposes Bringing in ISIS-Infiltrated Syrian Refugees,” Dec. 8, 2015
- “Letter to the Forward Editor: Preventing Radical Islamists From Murdering Americans Is a Moral Act,” by Morton Klein and Liz Berney, Esq., Jan. 31, 2017. Also available here.