“The work that we’re going to do now is the work that we’ve always done,” says Marjean Perhot, Catholic Charities Boston’s Director of Refugees and Immigration Services, about preparations to welcome Greater Boston’s share of Afghan refugees en route to their new home in America. “Pretty much whenever there’s been a refugee crisis, Catholic Charities has been there.”
It’s no lie. Over the last 40 years alone the organization’s refugee relief arm has helped provide housing, food, legal representation and more to refugees from the world’s war-torn regions — Vietnam, the Balkans and Africa among them — doing so, as it says, with “compassion, understanding and positive reassurance.”
They are ready again, as tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing their homeland’s bloodshed make their way in this direction, just as tens of millions like them have over the course of American history.
“These are people who have been persecuted in their countries, and they need homes, their kids need to get into schools, they need to find work,” Bill Canny, Executive Director of Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Catholic News Service. “We’re grateful for the opportunity to help. We don’t consider ‘we’re saving these people,’ who are in effect saving us by giving us the opportunity to help. This is what our church does, and it’s founded in the Gospel.”
In Boston, an old partnership of faith-based communities is reuniting to harness shared values to welcome these refugees. In 2017, with refugees and immigrants under siege, Barry Shrage, then the head of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, contacted longtime friend Father Bryan Hare of the Archdiocese of Boston. The result was a joint program to fund free legal assistance for those recently upon our shores. It was the latest chapter in a beautiful friendship and it was a successful one.
“We had no idea if we would raise ten dollars,” remembers Sarah Abramson, CJP’s Senior Vice President for Strategy and Impact. But within three weeks $640,000 was donated, and the fund would go on to attract thousands of donors.
“We know how aligned we are with Catholic Charities on these issues,” says Abramson. As in the Catholic Church, helping “the other” is at the core of Jewish identity. For Jews, she says, it is grounded in “the historical trauma of knowing what it feels like when people have not opened their doors to us.” The Jewish commitment to those in danger, to those fleeing, to those who are excluded or forgotten, says Abramson, “is rooted in Jewish values.”
Unsurprisingly, Catholic Charities and CJP were of the same mind as the prospect of a flood of Afghan refugees took shape. “Our feeling was ‘What can we do together again?’” Perhot says.
The result was the formation of the Fund for Afghan Immigrants and Refugees, or FAIR, a fund established to help Catholic Charities and the Jewish Vocational Services resettle refugees safely, quickly and with the two faith communities’ trademark warm-heartedness. “I could not think of a better partner to work with,” says Abramson of Catholic Charities.
The two organizations are blessed with a broader community that is predisposed to welcoming newcomers. Perhot points out that Boston’s universities and medical institutions have long been a magnet for other parts of the world. “People have gravitated to Boston for a long time,” she says.
From top to bottom, despite the finger pointing and the heartache over American losses, the best of America has generally been on display when it comes to these refugees. “We will welcome these Afghans,” President Biden said the other day. “Because that’s what America is.”
Boston’s faith communities are already there. “This feels like a moment to ensure that we are opening the doors,” Abramson says. “This is the spirit of America,” says Perhot, her professional twin. “We all come together.”
The dispiriting end of our long involvement in Afghanistan has plenty of dark clouds associated with it. Boston’s interfaith partnership to support the war’s refugees, however, is a bona fide silver lining.
Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
