Rabbi Joel Soffin, with his guide, Sokha, en route to the Cambodian village of Prek Tapraing, where his foundation will help build two schools.
Photo courtesy Yad Soffin Foundation
July 10, 2008
For Joel Soffin, retirement from the pulpit of Temple Shalom in Succasunna has meant something quite different from a quiet life of rest and relaxation.
Even as he served his Reform congregation for nearly 30 years, Soffin said, “My passion, my strongest interest, was always social action. So when I thought about retiring, it made sense that I would devote myself to social action.”
Before leaving the synagogue in January 2006, he set up the private Yad Soffin Foundation and gave it a second title, Jewish Helping Hands.
Through his guidance, those hands have reached far from the foundation’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
These days, they are extending to places as disparate as Maine, Cambodia, and Israel.
One key priority is the construction of two elementary schools in the Cambodian village of Prek Tapraing, an hour and a half away from nation’s capital, Phnom Penh.
Last January, the rabbi and five others traveled to Cambodia and decided “this was a place where we as Jews needed to be. The people who survived the genocide there and are now in their 30s and 40s are very anxious to create a country that will have strong positive values.”
The value that “impressed me most was that they were not really interceded in a handout. They requested help only so that their children could get a good education.”
The Yad Soffin Foundation set out to make their dream possible. Combining forces with a second fund-raising drive in the Ridgewood school system, they earned enough money to finance two schools for 500 students apiece. Their 10 classrooms will serve students between the ages of nine and 11. The extra money the groups raised will be spent on necessities ranging from a library to an electrical generator and wells for clean drinking water.
The inspiration came when he read an op-ed piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describing child prostitution in Cambodia. When he read the article, his family was sitting shiva for his brother Barry, an educator in Buffalo devoted “to saving kids who might otherwise be lost. We thought to ourselves, ‘What better thing could we do in Barry’s memory than this?’”
‘Rice money’
In Cambodia, Soffin met a man named Sothea Arun, who grew up as an orphan of the genocide in which an estimated 1.5 million people died between 1975 and 1979. Arun works in a Cambodian orphanage, and is committed to helping children attend school rather than have them work full time in the fields. He provides their foster families with $5 a month in “rice money.” It costs him $600 to subsidize all of the 10 years that each child will be in school.
Soffin’s foundation is helping to reimburse Arun’s efforts.
“We are sponsoring 13 orphans at $600 per child, plus we are paying for extra things they need, such as school supplies, uniforms, backpacks, bicycles, and pretty much whatever Arun thinks would help them,” said the rabbi. “He is really a saintly person.”
Before he returns to Cambodia next year for the schools’ dedication, Soffin has two other projects on his agenda.
Ethiopian elders gather in Rishon Letzion in March 2006. Immigrants there will be trained by Soffin’s foundation in a microloan operation so they can develop their own small businesses.
Photo courtesy Amir Shacham
One involves setting up a micro-loan program for Ethiopian immigrants living in the Israeli city of Rishon Letzion, a sister city of the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ under the Partnership 2000 community.
“In a sense the people are still living in Ethiopia,” said the rabbi. “Many of them came to Israel illiterate and still haven’t fit in to Israeli society. It is not that the Ethiopians are unsophisticated. They had business and ran farms in the villages where they were living,” he explained.
The foundation’s plan is to educate the immigrants about collateral-free low-interest microloans, then aid them in forming a community of borrowers and lenders.
“Our hope is they will use the abilities they have to create small businesses. Then we will help them along with whatever they need,” he said.
The undertaking is being assisted by UJC MetroWest.
“MetroWest’s Israel Office will connect the dots and help make it happen,” wrote Amir Shacham, director of UJC MetroWest’s Israel operations, in an e-mail from Jerusalem.
Shacham said he is very enthusiastic about Soffin’s project. “Launching the program during Israel’s 60th anniversary year and the 30th anniversary of the Rishon Letzion [partnership] makes it even more symbolic.”
Virtual community
Before he heads to Israel in September, the rabbi and 18 teenagers — many of them from New Jersey — will be working in Windham, Maine, to restore a home. Its owner, a member of a local synagogue, is “a woman with serious back problems who will soon be in a wheelchair,” he said.
“We call this ‘a week of Jewish religious living.’ The kids will live together for five days to help restore this house. In the mornings we do worship. Then we work all day. At night we study Torah.”
Some of the young people will come from his old congregation in Succasunna, others from Congregation Bet Ha’am in South Portland, Maine, and still others from the Barnard Temple in Franklin Lakes, where he now serves as a part-time rabbi-in-residence for social action programs.
While his first commitment has always been to social action, there is still something about having a full-time pulpit that Soffin said he misses.
“The biggest difference is I don’t have a real community anymore. I now have a virtual community. I have a Web site, but modern technology is not my natural inclination. Running a foundation is not running a congregation. I miss not being able to share all this with a community.”
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