What does HIAS mean today? To refugees around the world, it’s become an international word for hope, in dozens of tongues and for numerous faiths. To me, it symbolizes America — and Judaism — at its best. And it’s easy to see how HIAS stands for everything white supremacists hate: tolerance, understanding and empathy.

And who does HIAS bring into this country? I could easily rattle off a list of refugee all-stars: celebrity actors, Olympic athletes, pathbreaking inventors, acclaimed musicians and writers and artists. You might not know they were once refugees, but I can assure you — you know who they are. But that would be missing the point. HIAS didn’t help them because they could sing or write code; it helped them because they needed help.

The majority of HIAS’s clients aren’t famous, and while you probably don’t know their names, they’re part of your world nonetheless. They are people who used to be merchants and goat herders and professors. Some have stayed in their fields in America; many did not. They drive your taxis, dress your wounds, clean your houses. They watch over your businesses while you sleep. They know that the United States can give you a new life, but they also know it comes with a cost.

Two weeks ago, I’ve had a chance to reflect on just who it is that HIAS brings to this country after another HIAS client passed away: my mother.

Mom, like many older immigrants, had discovered firsthand that there’s a steep admission price to America. For 30 years, she had been a doctor in Ukraine, but the language barrier made that impossible when she came to America. The first few years here were awful: She felt she went from being a physician to being useless. It wasn’t until she began working as a night security guard that she finally felt happy again.

Immigration left my family strewn across three continents, which meant that more than half of those attending Mom’s funeral were native-born Americans. And so on a sunny fall afternoon, I watched a small caravan of Russian and English speakers wind across a patch of forest next to the office park in suburban New Jersey that Mom used to guard.

I watched these people honor Mom’s last wish: scatter her ashes at the place where she was reborn in America. I watched them celebrate the life of an immigrant who had every reason to be bitter at her lot in this country, and yet loved it and worked in it with honor. And I silently thanked HIAS for the strength and the grace it imports to America.

That’s what HIAS stands for. That’s who HIAS brings to this country.

Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka.