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And she gave birth to her firstborn son,
wrapped him in bands of cloth,
and laid him in a manger
because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7
My friends, we are famous. I know I shouldn’t brag, but it’s a really great story. One you should know. On Thanksgiving night, after the turkey, pie, and disappointing football games, I checked my work email. I know, I know. I shouldn’t have given in to the temptation to “work” on a holiday. But I am so glad I did because in my inbox was a marvelous message from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Wessel. He is the director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a frequent columnist for the Wall Street Journal where he worked for 30 years. He also has a soft spot for Eureka Christian Church. He and I exchanged emails last year when his mother passed away, so I already knew the connection.
You see, his mother and her family lived in Eureka when she was a teenager. I’ll let him tell the rest:
Seventy five years ago, a German Jewish teenager, who had been sent to safety in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport, arrived in New York where she was reunited with her parents. After a brief stay in New York, the three of them travelled across the U.S. by bus to Scattergood, Iowa, where the American Friends Service Committee had turned a school into a hostel for European refugees.
As the Nazi terror spread through Europe, the members of a Disciples of Christ Church in Eureka, Ill, decided to go beyond reading newspaper headlines and prayer. A delegation from the church drove to Scattergood, interviewed the teenage girl’s parents and offered them a new home in Eureka. And so the family moved into a fully furnished apartment and was welcomed into a community that had rarely known Jews, let along German-born Jews. The father got a job auditing municipal books in small Illinois towns. The mother got a job in the Eureka College kitchen. And the teenager got a free college education there. That teenager was our mother, Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel, who died last year at the age of 88. We grew up hearing stories from our grandmother and our mother about the end of their peaceful, pleasant life in Germany and the beginning of a new and prosperous life in the U.S.
Irm Wessel moved to New Haven in the 1950s, practiced clinical social work for four decades and, with our father, pediatrician Morris Wessel, raised four children in New Haven. When she visited the Eureka church several years ago, she reminded the good people of the Eureka Christian Church of the generosity of their parents and grandparents and she made a forceful plea for immigration reform. She never forgot the fear and desperation of being a refugee and a new immigrant, and was a lifelong advocate for those who came to America after she did.
Whenever David Wessel tells the story of his family’s new life in America, he mentions us. The passage above was included in a presentation he made at an awards ceremony for the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, Connecticut. The Thanksgiving email was to let me know that he also mentioned us in an interview for the Philadelphia Inquirer in a story that ran on November 27.
If we’re going to be famous, I’m glad it is for this reason. Hospitality is a core Christian discipline; it is vital to our faith. May we continue to burn with an undying commitment to welcome the stranger in our midst. For in so doing, as we ought to know, we also welcome the Christ.
