Jewish ‘Peace Corps’ prez bashes Bush on Darfur

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service, told the New Jersey Association of Jewish Communal Service it is “endlessly distressing” that the Bush administration has not intervened to halt the genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur, where she estimated a hostile government and its subsidized militia is killing African Muslims at a rate of 500 people each day.

Speaking at the Alex Aidekman Family Campus in Whippany on June 3, Messinger said, “Darfur is a crises to which the world and the Jewish community must respond. That is how genocide calls to us.”

The former borough president of Manhattan urged 100 listeners to “make a difference by trying to influence American policy. What our government does not do is increasingly shameful. We are not imposing tough sanctions on Sudan. We are not leading a world in demanding a united moral response to genocide.

“We are not even doing enough to move the African Union troops that have been promised as peacekeepers into Sudan with a broadened mandate to protect the lives of civilians who are still being killed,” she said, noting that the administration has had a close relationship with the government of the Sudan through the sharing of intelligence and the peace treaty it helped broker in January that halted a civil war involving the Sudanese Christian population.

“I respect that,” she said, but “the notion that the United States can still maintain a friendly and supportive relationship with a government that is killing its own people — I cannot give you answers. It is beyond my comprehension.”

Last Wednesday President Bush referred to the slaughter in Darfur as “genocide.” The president has rejected Great Britain’s suggestion that Group of Eight industrialized nations double their $25 billion-a-year aid to Africa.

“Folks, that’s really shameful. That’s really embarrassing,” said Messinger.

“These are small amounts of money in a large budget,” she said, pointing out that “a mere .15 per cent of our gross national product is committed by the United States to nonmilitary foreign aid.”

Meanwhile the Darfur Accountability Act, which would target Sudan with a variety of sanctions, is languishing in Congress.

Messinger’s audience of activists were mainly members of NJAJCS, whose Web site says its purpose is “to help recruit talented newcomers to our field and to lobby to our communities and governmental units, where appropriate, on matters of relevance and conscience.”

The group presented its annual Leo Brody Award to Sharon Rifkind, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Tikun Olam Initiatives program at the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey.

Rifkind heads a literacy program called Bergen Reads, aimed at insuring that all students in her county are able to read by the third grade.

The award is sponsored by Arthur Brody of Short Hills, a past president of UJC MetroWest, in memory of his father.

In a broad-ranging address, Messinger, who directs what she calls “essentially a Jewish Peace Corps,” said her group’s mission was to respond to “a universe of silent tsunamis, of problems all over the world that we—the entire Western world—appear that we can’t stomach being reminded of them every day.”

She said those problems “don’t impinge on our lives, but they ought to,” her voice growing emphatic as she cited grim statistics.

“There are 17,000 children, 17,000 children, who die every day from entirely preventable causes — from malnutrition, from pneumonia, from diarrhea, and the statistics, I promise you, only get worse.

“Every minute in this world, ten new people are infected with HIV. There are 140,000 children — two thirds of them girls — who don’t go to school. The problem is that any number I agree with you threatens to overwhelm. I tell you ‘17,000 children a day’ and you don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to hear it. The immediate response is ‘there is nothing I can do. That is such a big problem.’”

But Messinger reminded her audience of Jewish communal workers that “we can’t retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed. That’s an easy out. As Jews we’re not allowed to take the easy out. We have a set of moral obligations.”

Quoting the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became a leading theologian as well as an activist in the struggles for Soviet Jewry and African-American civil rights, Messinger told the group that “in a free world, where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty but all are responsible.

“So the responsibility that we carry, the burden, is that our faith does not allow us the convenience of being overwhelmed. There are ways for us to make a difference. It’s the Jewish thing to do.”

Noting that AJWS workers are committed for the next five years to help rebuild the lives of thousands of tsunami victims in Asia, she said their mission has expanded from its original plan to help devastated peoples restore their homes and livelihoods — providing many of them with nets and fishing boats.

“We discovered a new piece of work that has to be done in tsunami-affected areas. In various sections of Thailand and Sri Lanka, the governments and people in the private sector are showing up, talking to the people whose lives were devastated, and telling them there is such a severe danger of another wave coming that you must move your community inland.

“This is a hoax,” she said. “This will destroy people’s capacity to live off the seas, and it is being done because of the recognized tourist value of this beachfront property.”

Turning to other areas less familiar to most Americans, Messinger spoke of an AJWS delegation that was teaching women in Senegal the techniques of crop rotation and irrigation to “make their families food sufficient.

“It means that in village after village, large numbers of women will be able to stay home year after year and feed their families as opposed to previously, where they left their communities for five months, traveled for six hours to Darfur, took up residence there, and if they were lucky, they worked as maids, and if they were unlucky, they worked as prostitutes in order to bring money home. Their lives were changed literally by the planting of a few more seeds.”

In Honduras, she said, a micro-financing program has enabled 2,000 rural women to develop small businesses.

“Microfinance is an example of how little it takes to make a huge difference in the world, and borrowers pay back their loans at a rate of 97 percent, which is higher than any bank or credit union in the United States,” she said.

“The profits are invested by women in their children’s education and healthcare,” noting that such a system replicates the work of the Hebrew Free Loan Society in America, which began loaning money to non-Jewish immigrants after Jewish people in their communities no longer needed such financial aid.

Messinger said her group’s 200 programs in 35 countries were all part of a mandate “to go out from the world we know to the world most of us don’t know — not only the problems, but the solutions. We look for ways to make a difference and define ourselves as Jews, to make tikun olam real in more and more parts of the Jewish community. And of course and for sure to send a message and build a bridge to the rest of the people in the world who are in need of help come to see Jews as a people who are committed to social justice and a people ready to help make change.”

One simple way, Messinger suggested, was to insist that their agencies purchase only ‘fair trade’ coffee from companies committed to insuring workers adequate pay and working conditions.

“It will probably cost a little more, although you can buy it institutionally in large quantities. But in this case, a little more goes to the person who picked the beans. The difference, some 35 cents a day, will help to feed an extremely poor family. And fair trade coffee is more environmental, more ecological, and mostly you could do it with an explanation: ‘The coffee we drink everyday is making a difference for the people in the world who need our help.’”

She said the people from AJWS are “received spectacularly” in many parts of the world. “We don’t work with governments. We fund groups that are making change. We make sure our money gets directly to local projects. Not only do we not run into any problems, but for sure, we are shaping and changing people’s understanding of Jews.”

In one instance, a college student volunteer working in El Salvador told Messinger she became “really anxious” when the father of her host family asked whether she and her fellow Americans happened to be Jewish.

“She (the student) said ‘Why did you ask about whether we are all Jewish?’ And he said ‘We have thus very big agriculture project. Many many groups come to help us, but I’ve learned that many groups come but they don’t do much work. Some of those groups come and the only thing they want to do is build their own church, but when the Jews come, they stand shoulder to shoulder with us. They don’t teach us anything. They do the work that needs to be done. So if you tell me that everyone in your group is Jewish, then I’m going to relax.’”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.