by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

April 24, 2008

David Varnagy and his family are running out of time. Seven years after they came to the United States from Venezuela so he could further his medical studies, his visa is set to expire on June 24.

Unless he is able to cut through the red tape, the Florham Park resident will have to return to Caracas, in a country he describes as anti-Semitic and dangerous for its Jews.

Like other applications from foreign-born physicians seeking to extend their time in the United States, Varnagy’s wound up at the Citizenship and Immigration Services Service Center in Laguna Miguel, Calif., on the desk of a person known only as Officer 3599.

“He denied my case,” said Varnagy. “He said Venezuela is not a dangerous place and there is no anti-Semitism in Venezuela and all that kind of stuff.”

Attempts to contact the immigration service by telephone and e-mail were unsuccessful.

As someone with an Orthodox background and a rabbi for a grandfather, Varnagy strongly disagrees.

“The Jewish community has been beaten up by the government really badly,” he said. “The government every year randomly raids a synagogue or a club or a school. They justify that by saying they think there are going to be weapons or drugs with no good reason.”

Varnagy recalls a violent episode during his senior year in medical school in 1997.

“I was coming into my house and there were people in two cars waiting for me outside,” he said. “Two people shot me. I had four bullet wounds — one in my neck that injured my carotid artery, one in my arm, one in my chest, one in my spine. I am walking because it is a miracle. I was never political, never. We don’t know why this happened.”

The doctor, his wife, Miriam, and their eight-year-old daughter, Estrella, were all born in Venezuela, while their five-year-old son, Michael, was born in the United States.

On that basis, Varnagy applied for a waiver, arguing that returning to Caracas would be an “extreme hardship” for his son, the only person in the family with American citizenship.

“It would cause his United States-born child extreme hardship because of the targeted attacks of anti-Semitism,” said his lawyer, Jan Pederson of Washington, DC.

After Officer 3599 denied the waiver, Pederson appealed, and the immigration service’s Administrative Appeals Office in Washington agreed with her argument.

In a written opinion rendered on March 24, the office said that “the hardship that applicant’s child would suffer…would go significantly beyond that normally suffered upon the temporary separation of families.”

But Varnagy’s battle was hardly over.

“The officer in California has to now issue me the waiver,” he said. “Then my documents have to go to the Department of State, but the officer is withholding documentation, and he knows that if by June I don’t have my papers I am going to have to leave the country.

“To be honest, I am not going back to Venezuela because I cannot put my kids in that kind of jeopardy. There is no way.”

In recent years, Venezuela’s Jewish community has shrunk from 20,000 to 15,000, in what some say is a response to instability in the country since leader Hugo Chavez’ election in 1998.

‘A race against the clock’

In 2001, before arriving at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami as a surgical resident, Varnagy obtained a J-1 “exchange visitor” visa. It entitled the doctor, his wife, and their two children to remain in the United States.

The family moved to Florham Park in 2006. Varnagy commutes from there to Newark, where he is completing a second residency in vascular surgery and endovascular therapeutics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Varnagy said he has ruled out seeking asylum in the United States “for one reason: My parents and my grandmother and my wife’s grandmother still live in Caracas. If I have asylum it is very hard to go back.”

As he waits for the waiver, Varnagy continues his campaign.

“I’ve been calling Immigration every day to ask them to expedite the process. I call senators and congressmen. If they have a Jewish name, I call them. If they live in New Jersey, I call them. This whole thing has really been a nightmare,” he said. Contacted by NJJN, the offices of NJ Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez confirm that they are looking into Varnagy’s case.

Pederson, who described herself as “an eternal optimist,” foresees a happy ending.

“He is not out of danger yet, but I think he will be fine. We have a race against the clock, but I think we’ll make it.”

In the meantime, Michael will continue attending pre-kindergarten classes at the Leon and Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange. Estrella is a student at Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union in West Orange. The family attends services at the Chabad of Short Hills.

And Varnagy continues to pursue his dream.

“One of my goals is to become an American citizen. I know I cannot do it right away, but I will do it.”
Once that happens, Varnagy plans to move his family and practice medicine in the Orlando, Fla., area because “for us it is difficult to live with the cold.”

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Fanning the flames

A State Department March 13, 2008 report entitled “Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism” listed Venezuela, along with Syria, Belarus, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, as countries whose leaders and governments “fan the flames of anti-Semitic hatred within their own societies and even beyond their borders.”

It also charged that President Hugo Chavez has “publicly demonized Israel and utilized stereotypes about Jewish financial influence and control, while Venezuela’s government-sponsored mass media have become vehicles for anti-Semitic discourse, as have government news media in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”

One month earlier, Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece that some Venezuelan officials and commentators “resort to implicit and explicit anti-Semitic displays, including rehashing the ancient canard about Jewish control, vilifying Jews and Israel as agents of imperialism, and adopting anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish financial influence.”

In 2006, the Anti-Defamation Leage released a report saying that Venezuela under leader Hugo Chavez has experienced a “disturbing rise in anti-Semitism, fostered in large part by Chavez’s own rhetoric and that of his government institutions.”

In its most recent report on Venezuela, The Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University noted a trend there of “demonizing the State of Israel, relativizing the Holocaust and employing Arab anti-Semitic propaganda and traditional anti-Semitic motifs.”

— ROBERT WIENER

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