On this day: the Statue of Liberty is dedicated - The Jewish Chronicle

Inscribed on what is perhaps America’s most famous landmark and certainly one of its most treasured, is this: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!”

The lines were taken from The New Colossus, a poem written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus after a trip to Europe. Born in New York in 1849 to a large family of Spanish-Jewish ancestry, Lazarus came from a relatively wealthy background and was well-educated. At the precocious age of 17, her father Moses arranged for her first collection of poems to be published in private circles.

She attracted considerable attention in the literary world, staying as the guest of the Brownings in London, meeting William Morris and corresponding with her fellow American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson throughout her life.

Although she grew up secular and remained irreligious her whole life, after reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, she became interested in her Jewish heritage and began learning about the pogroms and antisemitic in the Pale of Settlement, later teaching Jewish immigrants in Manhattan.