This week, as Donald Trump closed America’s borders to Syrian refugees, a 1982 interview emerged with his son-in-law Jared's late Holocaust-surviving grandmother, Rae Kushner, in which she described her upset over America’s refusal to accept Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Escaping the ghetto in Novogrudok — in Nazi-occupied Poland — through a tunnel, she fled across Europe, ending up in a displaced person’s camp in Italy.
“We wanted to go to Africa, to Australia, to Israel. We would go anywhere where we could live in freedom, but nobody wanted us,” she said in the interview with Kean College of New Jersey Holocaust Resource Center. “So after three and a half years we finally got a visa to come to the US… For the Jews the doors were closed. We never understood that. Even President Roosevelt kept the doors closed. Why?”