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Almost no visitors snapping pictures at the spot noticed, let alone read, the two plaques of subdued bronze, instead honing in on a colorful item perched between them: a papier-mache mask depicting the statue\u2019s face in red, white and blue and covered with scores of flags representing some of the countries from whence came millions of people filling ships entering New York Harbor during a great wave of immigration running from the 1880s to the 1950s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The objects reflected a stark irony: Lazarus and her iconic poetry, which inspired countless newcomers to the United States long after her death, were being upstaged by the 21st century creation of an artist, George Dukov, himself an immigrant from Bulgaria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAn ardent patriot and poet, she wrote the immortal sonnet, \u2018The New Colossus,\u2019 which is inscribed on the plaque in the Statue of Liberty,\u201d states the text beside the bas relief dedicated in 1977 by the Emma Lazarus Commemorative Committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGive me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,\u201d reads the poem\u2019s best-known line.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Raj Konaseema, who was visiting New York this day, stopped to examine the plaques. A native of India, Konaseema moved in 2017 to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Konaseema \u201csaw the lady\u2019s face and wanted to know if there\u2019s any relationship between the statue and [her],\u201d he said of the plaque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside, on a walkway facing the front of the statue, Richard Hinsliff was reading an explanatory poster about Lazarus on the sweltering afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hinsliff, who immigrated from Leeds, England, in 2003 and lives just north of Manhattan, knew about the poem but not of its representing freedom for millions of immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think the symbolism of the statue is more important than the statue itself: of America being the symbol of freedom,\u201d said Hinsliff, who\u2019d come to the site with his U.S.-born wife and daughters and his mother, visiting from England. \u201cIt\u2019s fantastic symbolism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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Plenty of Americans and foreigners know that the Statue of Liberty was a gift to the people of the United States from the people of France. It was sculpted from copper by French artist Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Auguste Bartholdi and shipped to the U.S., where it was dedicated in 1886 on Bedloe\u2019s Island (now Liberty Island), located between the states of New York and New Jersey. It had remained in storage until funds were raised for constructing a granite pedestal on which the massive statue would be mounted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s where Lazarus came in. She\u2019d written plays, poems and a novel, was a translator of literary works and advocated for East European Jews who then were resettling en masse in the United States. She penned \u201cThe New Colossus\u201d for auctions in 1883-84 of items, mostly art, held in Brooklyn and Manhattan to benefit the pedestal fund. Lazarus died of an illness in 1887 at age 38. Her worsening condition likely prevented her from attending the statue\u2019s dedication ceremony. In 1903, following the lobbying of Lazarus\u2019s friend, Georgina Schuyler, a plaque of \u201cThe New Colossus\u201d was made and affixed to an inner wall of the pedestal\u2019s entrance. It remains on display today inside the pedestal close to its original placement. (The plaque in the aforementioned glass case is an exact replica.)<\/p>\n\n\n
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Approximately 4.5 million people visit the Statue of Liberty annually. If the tourists on this June day are representative, Lazarus is all but ignored. Standing later that day outside the brownstone on Manhattan\u2019s West 10th Street where Lazarus lived with her family and likely penned most of her works, I saw no passersby reading the blue historical marker that acknowledges Lazarus\u2019s residency there. When Matt Housch, who works for the Statue of Liberty historical site as a U.S. National Parks Service archivist, gave tours as a park ranger, people rarely asked about the poem and who wrote it, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere was not very much interest from the general public,\u201d he said. Housch admitted that he knew little about either Lazarus or the poem prior to taking the job \u2014 only the famous line about the hopeful, hapless immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Melanie Meyers memorized \u201cThe New Colossus\u201d in school. \u201cI feel that everyone knows the poem,\u201d said Meyers, the deputy director of the American Jewish Historical Society, whose holdings include several Lazarus items. \u201cI\u2019m not sure everyone knows who wrote it. I certainly don\u2019t think she\u2019s forgotten, but perhaps she\u2019s not as widely known as she should be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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Housch explained that the plaque in the 1960s was relocated a few feet within the pedestal to become part of a museum of immigration. In recent decades, it\u2019s dwelt nearly alone after the other items were moved to nearby Ellis Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s where a ferry took me after Liberty Island. I entered the main building into the room where arrivals\u2019 baggage was stored while people underwent inspection and processing. Those steps occurred upstairs in the registry room, better known as The Great Hall. My late Grandma Rozzie had written me a letter in which she speculated on what her father Morris Eisen, then single and still named Moshe, felt upon landing in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. He\u2019d surreptitiously left Lodz, unwilling to be conscripted, perhaps for a lifetime, into the Polish army. Morris, she wrote, had experienced an uncomfortable journey in steerage, but surely, upon reaching Ellis Island, all was subsumed by his excitement at starting a new life in a free land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strolling in the massive, near-empty hall, I imagined the thousands of fellow immigrants jostling with him on line awaiting questioning by U.S. authorities. I thought of the din of conversation and interrogation in scores of languages, the newcomers\u2019 fatigue and confusion mingled with hope and excitement. I wondered whether he could have foreseen then his decades of hard labor in the silk mills of Paterson, New Jersey, his meeting and marrying fellow immigrant Fannie Frishman, raising their daughter, losing two infant sons to disease and living in an apartment on Summer Street to which their granddaughter, my mother, would go after school for cookies and hugs \u2014 and, at the end of Morris\u2019s earthly stay, whether he felt the struggle had been worth it. Just two weeks before my encounter with the Great Hall\u2019s ghosts, I\u2019d driven with my cousin Effy Unterman to our great-grandparents\u2019 graves near Paterson and pondered some of the same questions. We snapped pictures of Morris\u2019s and Fannie\u2019s tombstones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Morris had landed at Ellis Island not tired, but certainly poor. He and the others on the ship constituted Lazarus\u2019s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. He may have later learned of the poet, or not. Moments before reaching Ellis Island, he must have gazed wondrously toward the eminent statue, the \u201cmighty woman with a torch,\u201d in Lazarus\u2019s words, who beckoned to newcomers to set down their bags and imbibe liberty beyond the new country\u2019s \u201cgolden door.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n The statue often goes by the nickname \u201cLady Liberty,\u201d but I\u2019m entranced by the moniker Lazarus bestowed on it: \u201cMother of Exiles.\u201d It broadcasts an almost-godlike gravitas and authority, a welcome to America\u2019s newcomers. More than a welcome \u2014 an official pat on the back to encourage the exiles-turned-arrivals, no matter the frayed state of their clothing or boldly accented English, and get them on their way in the new land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Views vociferously differed then, and diverge still, in Americans\u2019 debate over immigration and the securing of borders, but I\u2019ll always be grateful that “The New Colossus,” standing amidst a wide harbor where two rivers and an ocean converge, extended Lazarus\u2019s, and the country\u2019s, \u201cworld-wide welcome\u201d to Morris and my other ancestors, who saw the statue’s outline against the sky as they left exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"997003456390405171\"](\"https:\/\/blog.nli.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/997003456390405171-933x600.jpg\")
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