Our Voices

In 2023 and 2024, a team of attorneys from Peninsula Temple Sholom undertook three cases for Afghan refugees, petitioning for permanent refugee asylum in collaboration with the pro bono legal arm of Jewish Family & Children's Services East Bay ("JFCS-EB"). In total, we represented six refugees, plus one infant child of the refugees born in the US, who is a US citizen.
All of our clients were airlifted out of Kabul in August 2021. You may recall the images of the chaotic evacuation from Kabul Airport and the people crammed inside US cargo planes. Our clients were among those passengers.
All six refugees were granted permanent asylum based on credible fears for their safety, well-being, and freedom should they return to Afghanistan. The team included Nick Akers, Doug Luftman, Bob Buch, Abigail Akers, and myself. We worked with the support and encouragement of our synagogue's Social Justice Committee, led by Danielle Sherman and Marsha Begun.
Before discussing our cases, I'd like to share how this opportunity arose and some of its inspiration. Two years ago, in February 2023, I attended the HIAS Shabbat at PTS, where I heard Michael Chertok of JFCS-EB speak about their work welcoming refugees. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that JFCS-EB also provides pro bono legal services.
At the time, I didn't realize I was attending the HIAS Shabbat. I was there for the Sheloshim service of my dear friend Sue Runyan. Sue lived a life of service to others, a life cut short too soon. Confronted with Sue's loss, I asked myself, "How am I contributing to Tikkun Olam, and what if I have less time to do it than I thought?" I'm sure I wasn't the only mourner asking these questions.
So, Mr. Chertok’s appearance was bashert, and I reached out and offered to take on some work. I had an idea in my head about rallying some of our many other lawyers in the PTS community, but I wanted to do it myself first before I asked anything of others. In the coming months, I began to represent an Afghan refugee family: a husband who served in the pre-Taliban Afghan government (and extended family who served in that government as well as with US forces), as well as his wife, two children who were refugees, and a third who was born in the US.
 
Later, other lawyers (part of a group we called the “PTS Legal Eagles”), took on two additional cases on behalf of young adult individuals. Doing the work meant engaging in several hours of online training learning about advocating for refugee asylum. The established legal standards and rules are in fact not so complicated, but the ever-changing process for advocacy was very challenging to manage.
 
For example, the rules for bringing an interpreter changed in the weeks before my clients’ scheduled interview. Finding a reliable interpreter who speaks Dari was always difficult. At one point, I discovered that the manager of my parents’ apartment building in Burlingame was a native speaker, and he pitched in for several hours over Zoom for my client preparation session. Later, during my clients’ interview, a state department interpreter who was dialed in by phone interrupted at one point to disagree with our own interpreter’s translation. As her attorney, I was not even allowed to talk or object (although despite myself I did intervene at one point to make sure she could finish her answer).
 
Our cases all involved establishing credible fear of oppression in Afghanistan. This might not sound hard, but it involved drawing out troubling facts from our clients about Taliban visits to people’s homes searching for them after they were gone, family members who had worked for the government being disappeared and beaten, neighbors reporting on them, and other family members who were themselves Taliban making threats. It involved questions about whether it constitutes credible fear of oppression if a woman does not want to be imprisoned in a burka and not allowed to leave her home, even to take her child for essential medical care.
 
After a six month wait, my clients were granted asylum earlier last year. Our other two cases also both succeeded, thankfully, before the November election.
 
We do not know what the future brings in our current environment. What I do know is that we, as a community, can act together, case by case, to bring Tikkun Olam in the face of increasing darkness in our world. We are blessed with the skills and resources to do it, and we are blessed with the community to do it together.