How the US abandoned Jews during their refugee crisis

As the deep blue waves of the Atlantic Ocean wash on to the shores of Miami Beach, the southern part of Florida feels a world away from the rest of the United States.

With Cuba less than 150km from the southern tip of the Florida Keys, Miami has long been a place of decadence and escape, a world of long summer nights and endless sunshine.

Today, the Art Deco boulevards of South Beach, with their iconic shapes and pastel colours, are still impressive, even if they have lost much of their fabled glamour.

Miami continues to be a progressive place. It has long been a refuge for the gay community, and it also has the largest Cuban exile community in the country. Away from the fancy hotels and endless bars, one can retreat to the warm atmosphere of the many Cuban cafes and restaurants dotted across the city.

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Behind the uninspiring entrance to the Puerto Sagua cafe lies a magical piece of Havana, where Cuban expats and locals while away the hours sipping thick black Cuban coffee, and swapping stories of home.

But Miami is also home to another minority community. Tucked away on a quiet road between 3rd and 4th Street, away from the glare and glitz of South Beach, is the Jewish Museum of Florida. The small, intimate museum spans two buildings that were once synagogues, and offers a fascinating insight into the history of Florida’s Jewish community.

Jewish immigrants began settling in Florida in the early 19th-century, with immigration intensifying at the turn of the 20th-century. In 1841, Floridian David Levy became the first Jew to serve in the US Congress.

An estimated half a million Jewish people now live in southeast Florida. In central Miami, a powerful Holocaust memorial stands at the centre of a busy intersection, a moving reminder of the region’s Jewish heritage.

But the history of Jews in Florida was not always so bright.

The Jewish Museum is located at the northern boundary of what was once essentially a Jewish ghetto – Jews were not permitted to live north of 5th Street on Miami Beach. As late as the 1950s, some Floridian hotels advertised their non-Jewish credentials. “Always a view, never a Jew,” read one hotel advertisement. Others opted for the phrase “Gentile clientele”, or the more subtle euphemism “restricted clientele”.

Lowest moment

Miami was also the place where arguably the lowest moment in the US’s relationship with the Jewish community unfolded.

In 1939, the SS St Louis set sail from Hamburg with 937 passengers, mostly Jewish refugees from Germany and eastern Europe. Most had applied for US visas and the ship had planned to dock in Cuba before travelling on to the US. But even before the ship departed, it became clear that the Cuban government was growing nervous about allowing such a large number of refugees to land.

By the time the ship docked, only a handful of passengers were permitted to disembark. Following days of negotiation, the ship was forced to move on and it sailed north towards the US.

It travelled as far as the Florida coast – so close that the passengers could see the lights of Miami. But president Franklin D Roosevelt refused to grant the passengers refuge. A state department telegram passed to a passenger said that passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States”.

The ship was forced to leave American waters on June 6th, 1939, and sail back to Europe. It is unclear how many of those passengers perished in the Holocaust – most were transferred directly to Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK – but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that more than 250 died in the second World War.

The story of the SS St Louis undermines the commonly-held view of the US’s unconditional support for the Jewish community and the political aspirations of the Israeli state.

In fact, as former UN ambassador Samantha Power argues in her book A Problem From Hell, the US government and public were slow to accept the reality of the Holocaust.

Many of the reports emanating from Europe during the 1940s were met with silence or disbelief, both by officials in the state department and the public at large. It was only in the 1960s that terms like Holocaust and genocide began to be used in earnest, as the true horror of the concentration camps began to be revealed.

At a time when debates about immigration are once again to the fore in American society, the tragedy of the SS St Louis is a reminder that the United States was not always a welcoming place.