The Man with the Sign

He was holding a piece of cardboard. Four letters in block print: HIAS—the acronym of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which had arranged my passage from Vienna to New York in August 1985. I was eighteen years old, carrying one suitcase and the residue of thirteen months in limbo. I had crossed Iran crouched in the back of a pickup, waited for paperwork in Pakistan, and waited months more in Vienna. Now I stood at the arrival gate at JFK, scanning reunions of travelers who had nothing to do with me, until I found the sign.

“I’m Ramin,” I said.

“Paul Barash. HIAS port receptionist.” His handshake was firm, undiminished by its repetition.

Outside, the August air filled with exhaust, asphalt, and the collective exhalation of eight million people, hit like a wall. Paul hailed a cab. I pressed against the window past yellow cabs weaving like mechanical fish, steam rising from grates as if Manhattan were seething from below, and skyscrapers so tall they seemed provocative, audacious.

“You know,” Paul said, as if continuing a conversation already underway, “there are so many restaurants in New York, you could eat at a different one every night for years and never repeat.”

I said nothing. For 13 months, I had calculated food in terms of days and dollars: whether I could afford both lunch and dinner, or whether I would need to choose. I was mystified that abundance could constitute a problem.

Then I noticed the scar — a pale arc beneath his throat. He caught my gaze.

“Mugging,” he said. “Late night. I resisted. Dumb.” A half-smile. “Inch deeper and you’d be riding with someone else.”

I nodded. My mind moved between the cab and a Pakistani checkpoint, between his scar and the calculations that had governed every border I had crossed. Even here, for those who belonged, safety was provisional. That was not a comfort; it was recognition.

Paul Barash was not offering mercy. He showed up, held a sign, shook a hand, said his welcome, and made conversation about restaurants on the way into the city. He was part of a network that had met ships carrying Jews fleeing pogroms in the 1880s, had processed Holocaust survivors in the 1940s, and had welcomed Soviet refuseniks in the 1970s. Now it was our turn — Iranian Jews. Each wave carried its own particular damage. The work remained the same.

I never saw him again. He died in 2013 at the age of 88, five years before a gunman shot up the Tree of Life synagogue and named HIAS as his motivation.

I have spent 40 years building a life on the foundation that Paul Barash’s work helped make possible. I was humbled by the realization of what I owe to the network that saved me and many others, quietly and below the radar of public scrutiny. Without fanfare, Barash and his HIAS colleagues defended my life, and now, it is my obligation to defend and protect their work on behalf of refugees, whose fear and persecution have led them to our shores.