If this country had not admitted my immigrant grandfather Yitzchok Lempert (later known as Isaac Lampert) in 1904, and my grandmother Rochel Perski Lempart (later, Rose Lampert) three years later with my Aunt Basia (Bessie), I would not exist. Nor, I should add, would my three sons. My mother, Emma Lampert Meyer, was the first American born child of this immigrant family, in 1908, in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The family back in Volozhin, in what is now Belarus, kept in touch, until the war, when the correspondence abruptly stopped. The entire family, except for one cousin who escaped, was murdered in May 1942, two months before I was born, by the Nazis and their collaborators for the “crime” of being Jewish. God bless America! And God help America — and the new immigrants yearning to be free — in this frightening New World Order that makes “never again” feel like nothing more than a hollow slogan.

(Note: I had originally posted this to Facebook friends, but I am re-posting it here, as it remains relevant.)