1. Essential Questions: Who belongs in America? Who does not belong?
Who decides?
What responsibility do we have for others?

2. Children at the Border - NYTimes August 7, 2014.
By HAEYOUN PARK UPDATED August 7, 2014
Nearly 63,000 children have been caught crossing the United States border alone since October — double last year’s number. President Obama has called the surge an “urgent humanitarian situation,” and lawmakers have called for hearings on the crisis.
Click here to read the entire article.
How might Sacks’ parables of immigration by applied to understand the situation of the unaccompanied minors?

3. To Do:
Watch: Governor Deval Patrick’s Sheltering of Unaccompanied Children Press Conference 7/18/14. You don’t need to watch all the responses afterwards, but make sure you watch Rabbi Bill Hamilton (skip ahead to 15:54)
Record 3-2-1:
3 facts about the situation
2 key quotes.
1 question you want to ask

4. Sheltering of Unaccompanied Children Press Conference 7/18/14

5. Sheltering of Unaccompanied Children Governor Patrick Press Conference 7/18/14
Air - Pair - Share:
Everyone will read 1 quote they recorded.
Partner share of responses with a partner. What did you notice that was similar or different?
Class discussion.

6. “My faith teaches that if a stranger dwells in your land, you shall not mistreat him, but rather love him as yourself, for you were a stranger in Egypt.”
Gov. Deval Patrick

7. Rabbi Bill Hamilton, Kehillat Israel
starts at 15:54

8. Journal entry: “Children at the Border”
If you were the rabbi, or other ‘person of faith’ who had the opportunity the respond after Patrick’s speech, what would you say?

9. “My inclination is to remember what happened when a shipful of Jewish children tried to come to the United States in 1939 and the United States turned them away, and many of them went to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. I think we are a bigger-hearted people than that as Americans, and certainly as residents of Massachusetts.”
Gov. Deval Patrick

10. The Scenario
Ms. Rose Herrmann, a U.S. citizen and granddaughter of two passengers on the ship MS St. Louis, has brought to the Jewish Court of All Time (JCAT) a claim against the government of the United States seeking reparations as recompense for the decision by the United States government not to offer safe harbor to the 937 passengers who were aboard the ship when it entered American waters in June of 1939.
In her suit, Ms. Herrmann, seeks:
a formal apology from the government of the United States
$75 million to be put into a fund (to “address the threats to humankind of the 21st century”) to be administered by agents appointed by heirs of the passengers.
Officers of JCAT have agreed to gather great figures from across human history to hear Ms. Herrmann’s case.