By Deborah Hirsch
A few months after Judith Bernstein-Baker had assumed the top post at HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society ] and Council Migration Service in 1998, she was working late when the phone rang.
She picked up, figuring it must be her husband at that hour.
Instead, it was a U.S. customs official at the airport.
He had a family there from Kosovo who somehow managed to get on the plane without visas. That meant he had no choice but to put them in detention unless an approved agency like hers could temporarily take responsibility.
Bernstein-Baker worked the phones until she found someone to house the family. Over the next few weeks, she helped them weigh their options for asylum.
Four months after they left for Canada to live with a relative, news reports confirmed the ethnic cleansing the family had described, and Bernstein-Baker knew the man had been telling the truth about his missing fingers.
"If they had been returned to Kosovo, they could have easily been killed," she said.That was the first time, she said, that "I really understood what it meant to save lives. We were doing it all the time, but this was really saving a life."
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