Andy Silton’s Full Circle: A Fund in Memory of His Parents

Walk into Andy Silton’s dining room and you’ll find the table half buried under stacks of papers. These aren’t bills or busywork but something much closer to his heart: documents containing information about his parents and their families.

Their stories were hardly short of drama. Andy’s mother and her family, facing deportation in Vichy, France, illegally crossed the Swiss border as stateless Jews in September 1942. His father’s family, meanwhile, slipped through German lines in Yugoslavia in 1941, were captured by the Italian Army, and were interned in camps in Albania and Italy. After their liberation, they worked for the British Army and an international relief agency to provide services and support for refugees.

Although Andy has always known that his parents were survivors of the Holocaust, three years ago he became determined to understand their stories more deeply. But just as he was beginning his research, Andy’s father passed away—leaving him with an inheritance he hadn’t expected. He knew he wanted to use the funds in a way his parents would have appreciated. And as he began to explore various causes he might support, Andy came up with a possible theme.

“It dawned on me that their experience as immigrants really defined my parents’ lives and that when they thought about other people and people in need, they often came back to their experiences and the fact that they had been stateless and had these incredible journeys in the 1930s and ’40s.”

Meanwhile, he kept delving more deeply into his family’s archives. And one day: “Lo and behold, I discovered that my mother worked for HIAS in Switzerland.”

The pieces started coming together. Andy started looking at organizations working to support refugees. His parents had been active politically, so he knew he wanted to support a group that helped advocate for the rights of displaced people. But it was also important to him to reach people where and when they most needed help—whether in Afghanistan, Chad, or Ukraine.

“As I investigated HIAS,” Andy says, “my conviction grew that this was the right thing to do. I talked to people in my community and relatives and discovered how many had been touched by HIAS in some way. So it became this overwhelming ‘yes.’ This is what I need to do. It was like closing a circle.”

Andy reached out to HIAS. What he most wanted was for his support to meet the needs of the organization, not the other way around. When he learned that one of HIAS’s challenges was quickly evaluating fresh crises, that felt like an area where he could make a real impact. “It's not that this emergency fund provides anywhere close to all the resources, but it’s a source of money that, when the alarm bell rings, they can get a team on the ground tomorrow to figure out what’s going on.”

Although Andy could have made one major gift to be used over a number of years, creating an endowment via the HIAS Foundation—one that would exist in perpetuity and grow exponentially in its impact—seemed to him a more lasting way to honor his parents.

“The idea in making it an endowment,” says Andy, “is that it will be there in perpetuity. It's the hope that the fund will grow larger over time. Because goodness knows, you know, there's no end in sight of emergencies.”

With the Peter and Lore Silton Endowment fund, Andy is not only remembering his parents but thinking of his grandchildren and all those who will follow. “There are so many aspects of our current environment, whether political upheaval, social upheaval, or global warming … all these things that are leading to mass migration. It’s central to a lot of what’s going on in our world. Supporting refugees is not political. It’s about helping human beings.”