“If We Don’t Care About the Future, Who Will?”: Jim Hamos Creates the Agnes and Gary Hamos Fund

Jim Hamos grew up knowing his family’s refugee story. He lived it. Born in Budapest in 1953 to parents who had, against all odds, survived the Holocaust and its aftermath, Jim was three years old when the Hungarian Revolution forced his family to flee. “The tanks are coming down the street,” he recalls, “and my grandmother, who has stayed all this time, through all this loss, looks at my parents and says, ‘You’re leaving tomorrow. Take two suitcases. The kids get one toy each. I’ve arranged for you to get on the train. I have smugglers who will take you across the border.’ So off we go.”

Jim even remembers that his toy was a teddy bear while his sister had a doll.

What he didn’t know until just a couple years ago, though, was that his family’s airlift from Munich to the United States was sponsored by HIAS.

This discovery came in 2021, when Jim was approaching retirement and starting to get interested in genealogy. At the time, he was also involved with a group at his synagogue that was working to help Afghan refugees, work that introduced him to HIAS. And one day, looking at the flight manifest from his family’s trip, in the column next to their names he saw: HIAS. HIAS. HIAS.

Jim says, “Only then did I realize, not only is HIAS an organization that works with refugees—but on top of that, it had a very personal connection for me.”

After that, the choice to create the Agnes and Gary Hamos Fund—an endowment in his parents’ names that benefits HIAS annually and in perpetuity—felt natural.

“I wanted to do something to honor my parents. And I wanted to give to HIAS. I wanted to do it in an intelligent way, knowing that the refugee story is not going to end.”

Through his role on the board at his synagogue, Temple Micah in Washington, D.C., Jim had thought a lot about what it means to ensure that an organization lives beyond you. In the Cleveland community where he was raised, he says, people were always trying to understand the past, live in the present, and also think about the future. “This notion of balance was in the ether there,” he says. “If we don’t care about the future, who will?”

Now, he says, he talks to his kids (“maybe ad nauseum”) about putting their lives in perspective. “I believe we’re part of this world,” he says, “and we’re sort of ripples in time.” He also encourages his kids and others not to wait to ask questions. While Jim is grateful that his mother lived long enough to share many stories with him, he regrets never asking her or his father why either of them stayed so long in Hungary, given how many of their family members had either perished or left.

Whatever the reason, Jim says, “the happy part of that story is that they met and married.”

Jim is grateful for all that his parents taught him—about love, hard work, and helping others. And now he’s passing on their legacy as he creates his own. As he tells his children: “You’re not here for that long. What do you want your life to be? How do you want to be remembered?”