“Bussel, David and his daughter Esther Lotker from Novogrudok, currently in New York are sought by Nachum Kushner.”
The ad, in Yiddish, appeared on page two of the May 17, 1946, edition of the Forward, the nation’s largest Jewish newspaper. It was one of dozens under the title “Jewish Survivors Seeking Their American Relatives.”
Nachum Kushner was the great-grandfather of Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser. A hatmaker from what is now Belarus, Nachum survived the Holocaust with his daughters Rae (Jared’s grandmother) and Lisa by tunneling out of the Novogrudok ghetto and living among resistance fighters in the forest. In the same woods, Jared’s grandfather, Joseph Berkowitz, who had escaped from a work camp, hid with his siblings.
Seven decades later, their grandson became a top official in an administration that sharply restricted immigration and cut the number of refugees the country admits to its lowest level ever. Trump, in his current presidential campaign, has pledged to suspend the refugee program, ban refugees from Gaza, and turn back asylum seekers.
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New details about Kushner’s family history reveal the extent of the aid and shelter his grandparents received upon their arrival in the United States as desperate, nearly penniless refugees.
After the war, Joseph and Rae found each other in Budapest and married in August 1945. They and the other surviving family members were then smuggled from Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe into American-occupied Italy. Unable to continue to Palestine, as originally planned, they entered a displaced persons camp.
It was there that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration placed the ad for the Kushners. Survivors were desperate to find their families, and NGOs were hoping to find visa sponsors for the stateless refugees in their care. Each week, the Forward ran hundreds of free ads and broadcast the listings over the radio.
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The Kushners were looking for David Bussel, an 80-year-old retired garment worker in the Bronx who had left Europe in the 1880s. He was the uncle of Joseph Berkowitz, who later took his wife’s last name, Kushner. The following Monday, the Kushners ran another ad for Nachum’s relative Leah Gross, who had immigrated to New York in 1901.
They found them both.
“We wanted to leave for Israel, but at the time it wasn’t possible,” said Rae Kushner in a Yiddish-language testimony recorded in 1972 at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum. “We wanted to go to Africa, but it was difficult to enter. Until we were able to connect with America.”
Still, the Kushners had to wait for Congress to pass the Displaced Persons Act in the summer of 1948 to get their visas. “My husband had two uncles and an aunt in America,” Rae said. But while the Kushners waited in Italy, all three relatives died, she said.
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After Bussel died in January 1948, it fell to his son Harry, a Bronx physician, to sponsor the Kushner family, which by then included a newborn daughter, Jared’s aunt Linda. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the family of five set sail from Genoa on March 16, 1949.
But while the ship was at sea, Harry Bussel rescinded his sponsorship. The HIAS file stated, “He does not know the family” and “assumes no responsibility.” When the family arrived on March 29, 1949, according to the file notes, they had two dollars to their name and no one to take them in.
The Kushners were referred to a shelter.
By the time of his death in 1985, Joseph with his wife Rae owned a New Jersey real estate empire of more than 4,000 properties. During his time in the White House, Jared Kushner kept a photo of his grandparents in his desk drawer, finding inspiration in their survival and rags-to-riches story.
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Their first toehold in America was a room at Capitol Hall, a once-elegant hotel turned shelter at 166 West 87th Street on New York’s Upper West Side.
It was one of 14 Manhattan hotels run by a coalition of aid groups called United Services for New Americans that temporarily housed many of the 140,000 Holocaust refugees admitted to the United States from 1946 to 1953. Families with no one waiting for them at the docks were referred to one of the hotels or to a 400-bed HIAS shelter in the former Astor Library, which is now the Public Theater.
Echoing New York City’s current policy for arriving asylum-seeking families, the Kushners were given a room for 60 days, a food allowance, laundry service and help with clothing, medicine and other incidentals.
“Dusty and dingy” is how Joseph Berger described Capitol Hall in a New York Times essay last year. Berger, a retired Times reporter, stayed in the hotel when he came to New York in 1950 with his Polish Jewish family at the age of five. Images of recent migrants sleeping outside a Manhattan hotel spurred him to reflect on the similarities between the two waves of immigration.
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Today, Capitol Hall serves as transitional housing for homeless New Yorkers. Nearby, the Riverside Terrace Residence and the Belnord Hotel house mostly Latin American migrant families.
Last year, Mayor Eric Adams warned that the arrival of more than 170,000 migrants would “destroy the city.” Trump said at a recent rally in the South Bronx, “They want to get us from within. I think they’re building an army.”
Jared Kushner, who is not officially involved in his father-in-law’s presidential campaign and has said he doesn’t plan to join a second Trump administration, has mostly remained quiet on the issue of immigration. An exception came in 2022, when he criticized Trump’s political rival Ron DeSantis for using asylum seekers as “political pawns” after the Florida governor chartered flights of migrants to blue states.
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But Jared’s uncle Murray Kushner, the 73-year-old chairman of the Kushner Real Estate Group, recoils at what he called “Trumpian casting of aspersions of immigrants and refugees as murderers and killers.” In an interview at his company headquarters in Jersey City, he said he was struck by the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and the postwar American antisemitism directed at his parents.
“They were also afraid of taking us in,” Rae Kushner said in her Yad Vashem testimony. “They thought we were no longer human, that we were animals.”
When President Harry S. Truman in 1946 pushed for Congress to allow more refugees from Europe, conservative groups such as the American Legion resisted what they saw as a threat to the country’s “racial composition.” A Gallup poll at the time found that 72 percent of Americans opposed increasing immigration, as Congress was contemplating at the time.
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“The opponents of [displaced persons] legislation, trading in timeworn Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories,” wrote historian David Nasaw in his 2020 book “The Last Million,” “suggested that those who had lived in the Soviet Union or Soviet-dominated Poland and been liberated by the Red Army were more than likely to be Communist sympathizers or clandestine operatives.”
The bill that Congress passed in 1948 called for rigorous vetting of refugees and excluded anyone who had not entered American, British or French zones before the end of 1945. This barred 90 percent of Polish Jews, like the Kushners, who were seen suspiciously by Cold War America. Not only had they been liberated by the Red Army, but Nachum Kushner had been jailed by the Soviet secret police for six weeks in 1945 for bartering for salt, according to his 1972 Yad Vashem testimony. To get around the restrictions, the Kushners presented themselves to American officials as German Jews, and Joseph Berkowitz became Joseph Kushner, pretending to be his father-in-law’s son, according to Andrea Bernstein in her book “American Oligarchs.”
The Kushner’s HIAS file indicates the family regularly visited with case workers at the Hotel Marseille on 103rd Street and Broadway. The largest hotel housing survivors, it had a nursery, medical facilities, a kosher kitchen and a center with free clothing. The lobby had the feel of a postwar European train station, with a dozen languages spoken and dramatic reunions.
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Despite the sense of hope, many of the residents remained in survival mode. “I have to keep telling them that they needn’t take bread to their rooms hidden in their clothes,” Ralph Astrofsky of the United Services for New Americans said in a 1940s radio interview.
The Kushners were no different. “They seemed to believe that they could get what they need or want by exercising pressure on us,” a case worker wrote. “They also tried to obtain everything at once as if they would not get everything they were entitled to.”
But the file also said the Kushners had “a tremendous drive to establish themselves and start off again.” The case worker said Joseph Kushner took on a tremendous amount of responsibility for the family.
It’s that drive and grit that made it into Jared’s 2022 memoir, “Breaking History.”
“Two days after arriving, my grandfather showed up early at a construction site in Brooklyn, willing to work hard,” Jared wrote, without mentioning the shelter stay. “My grandfather was a simple, quiet man who had no formal schooling. But he spoke six languages, and he lived the American dream.”
The case file shows that two weeks after their arrival, Joseph was unemployed. Still, the overall story is true. Four years after arriving with just $2, Joseph pooled his savings from working as a laborer with other Jewish immigrants to start building New Jersey homes.
While Murray Kushner said nothing can compare to the Holocaust, he sees today’s migrants as not so different from his family. “They’re looking for an opportunity to raise children and to be successful,” he said. “They’re all grasping at something. They just need an opportunity.”
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