What is our Global Jewish Responsibility?

Remarks by Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein, Senior Rabbi, Central Synagogue
Delivered at the JDC Ambassadors Global Symposium
December 3, 2012

It is a tremendous honor to be with you this morning and a special joy to personally salute you who are involved in and support the JDC.  In my mind you are responsible for and further the work of one of the great heroic organizations of Jewish life. To say this is not hyperbole because I have seen your work in action around much of this world.

Perhaps the most personally stunning and surprising experience I had with JDC was when in the late 1990’s I travelled with a small group of Jewish leaders to visit an Albanian refugee camp during the height of the Kosovo conflict and then to take some of those refugees with us to Israel. In those days brutalized refugees were flowing across the border seeking food and water and shelter and refuge.

I’m not sure what I expected when I arrived in Albania but a tent with a JDC sign outside was nowhere on my screen of possibilities. It was there and then that I came to understand the expansive theater of JDC operations which combat the results of human warfare and misery and are on the ground in the face of the most horrendous natural disasters as in Haiti after the earthquake. I comprehend the exquisite purity of an organization which has as its focus saving people in extremis no matter what their national origin, race, religion or gender. For that I salute and thank you.

The topic you have asked me to address is “What is our Global Jewish Responsibility?” In forming this question I suspect the planners of this symposium were purposeful in framing the question with inherent ambiguity for in fact this topic properly raises two very separate issues.

Helping in Haiti

Photo credit: Hollis Rafkin-Sax

by Jayne Lipman
co-chair, JDC Ambassadors
member, JDC Board of Governors

There is something addictive about helping in Haiti.

During my recent trip with JDC Interface, I met volunteers from all over the world who told me that they came to help in Haiti and never left, or that they couldn't wait to come back again.

It's a strange thing to say in a country that has been so devastated - not only by the 7.0 earthquake, which occurred on January 12, 2010 and immediately hit the front pages, but also by decades of corruption, questionable foreign interventions, revolutions and coup d'états that have eroded the once beautiful countryside and stolen the hope of so many of its people.

But that's precisely how outsiders fit in. Relief organizations bring equipment and know-how, but also a stubborn imported optimism.