This is the poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus. Lazarus famously penned her sonnet in response to the waves of Russian-Jewish refugees seeking refuge in the Unites States of America as a result of murderous Russian pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander Ⅱ in 1881. At a time when she was also translating classical Jewish poetry, her identification and revisioning of the Statue of Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles,” points to the familiar rabbinic Jewish identification of the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence, always gendered feminine) with the light of the Jewish people in their Diaspora, as found in the Talmud Bavli, tractate Megillah 29a.4:

Source (Hebrew)

Translation (English)

תניא ר״ש בן יוחי אומר בוא וראה כמה חביבין ישראל לפני הקב”ה שבכל מקום שגלו שכינה עמהן גלו למצרים שכינה עמהן שנאמר הֲנִגְלֹה נִגְלֵיתִי לבית אָבִיךָ בִּהְיוֹתָם בְּמִצְרַיִם וגו׳ (שמואל א׳ ב:כז) גלו לבבל שכינה עמהן שנאמר לְמַעַנְכֶם שִׁלַּחְתִּי בָבֶלָה (ישעיהו מג:יד) ואף כשהן עתידין ליגאל שכינה עמהן שנאמר וְשָׁב ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֶת־שְׁבוּתְךָ (דברים ל:ג) והשיב לא נאמר אלא ושב מלמד שהקב״ה שב עמהן מבין הגליות

It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai says: Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before the blessed Holy One. As every place they were exiled, the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) went with them. They were exiled to Mitsrayim, and the Shekhinah went with them, as it is stated: “Did I reveal myself to the house of your father when they were in Mitsrayim?” (I Samuel 2:27).[4] The midrash relies on the shared two-letter root, גל (g’l), between the words exiled (galu) and reveal (niglah).  They were exiled to Babylonia, and the Shekhinah went with them, as it is stated: “For your sake I have sent to Babylonia” (Isaiah 43:14). So too, when, in the future, they will be redeemed, the Shekhinah will be with them, as it is stated: “Then YHVH your elo’ah will return with your captivity” (Deuteronomy 30:3). It does not state: Hashem will bring back, (i.e., They will cause the Jewish people to return,) but rather it says: “Hashem will return,” which teaches that the blessed Holy One will return together with them from among the various exiles.

I have set the text of Emma Lazarus’s prayer-poem side-by-side with its Yiddish translation by Rachel Kirsch Holtman. The translation appears in a section dedicated to Emma Lazarus in Holtman’s 1938 work, Fir Barimte Froyen (Four Famous Women). The Hebrew translation was made by Prof. Karen Alkalay-Gut and transcribed by the American Jewish Historical Society as part of their The New Colossus Translation Project. Unfortunately, Karen Alkalay-Gut’s name doesn’t currently appear alongside her translation on their web page. However, a youtube video was separately shared by the AJHS of the translation read by Karen Alkalay-Gut in 2021. Herself a Jewish immigrant who passed through Ellis Island as a child, she offered the following reminiscence:

I was three when I was brought to Ellis Island for a medical examination because the remnants of whooping cough made me suspicious. When I returned to Ellis Island after 70 years I remembered exactly where the doctor’s office had been and how surprisingly pleasant the experience had been. So when my brother excitedly regaled me with having seen the Statue of Liberty, I was just as happy that a nurse and a doctor had welcomed me personally to my new home. Eight years later, having climbed that statue I felt my welcome was complete.

Recordings of the poem were likewise recorded by their translators in other languages: Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Filipino, French, Igbo, Italian, Jamaican Patwa, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Scots, Slovak, and Ukrainian. Many thanks to the American Jewish Historical Society’s New Colossus Translation Project for sharing these with the world.

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