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I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

The time has come to end the suffering and the plight of millions of Palestine refugees in the homeland and the Diaspora, to end their displacement and to realize their rights, some of them forced to take refuge more than once in different places of the world.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

The refugee crisis shows we can't be isolated from the world's geopolitical troubles.

For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.

We of the modern age are a bridge between the old human and the new one. We still have the mentality of the old human - a slave mentality, like the Children of Israel in Egypt: too controlled, full of fear.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

We have a very structured process for taking in refugees. It takes almost two years to transition from another country into the United States through the refugee process.