During the past several weeks, many have paid tribute to the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., honoring his military service during World War II and accomplishments as a businessman and politician. While I do not aspire to recapitulate his life's work here, I would like to recognize one of Lautenberg's most significant and enduring achievements — the Lautenberg Amendment — which facilitated the resettlement of tens of thousands of Jewish and Christian refugees from the former Soviet Union.
I was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated with my family in 1989. Like the thousands of Soviet Jews who emigrated around that time, my family's journey to the United States included a temporary "layover" in Italy. While in Italy, we received assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in applying for refugee status, which was granted in August 1989. Although I have few vivid memories of my family's time in Italy, I distinctly recall the nervous look on my father's face as we waited for a charter bus in Santa Marinella that would transport us to the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, where we were scheduled to board a Trans World Airlines flight bound for New York. My father would later confide that his anxiety had less to do with any uncertainty he felt about starting a new life in the United States, and more with the possibility that our bus would break down on the way to Rome and cause us to miss our only opportunity to travel to the United States. I imagine that many Soviet Jews who sought to immigrate to the United States at the time shared my father's anxiety and paranoia about having their aspirations unexpectedly forestalled.
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