Thursday, April 30, 2009

Holocaust Survivor’s Past Drove Her to Help Detainees

Many times, her father told her the story of their flight from Poland, and he never forgot the kindness the Romanian Jews showed them. “My father always said that people helped him survive,” Blum said. “So, it’s kind of like, what comes around, goes around.”

by Rebecca Dube, The Jewish Daily Forward
April 27, 2009

Almost no one noticed or cared when Ahmad Tanveer, a 43-year-old Pakistani New Yorker, died of an apparent heart attack while being held in jail, awaiting deportation.

Tanveer’s name did not appear on any list of immigration detainees who had died in custody. He never came up in testimony that the Department of Homeland Security gave to Congress.

His death in 2005, in Freehold, N.J.’s Monmouth County jail, might have gone unremembered and unremarked forever if not for the efforts of a Holocaust survivor who was determined to fight for the rights of immigration detainees. [...]

Read the full article at:
http://www.forward.com/articles/105192/

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