While American political discourse around whether to accept Syrian refugees smolders under the embers of xenophobia, Canadians have been opening their hearts and their wallets to bring in Syrian refugees.<\/p>\n
Canada is one of the only countries with a private sponsorship option, which means that groups of ordinary citizens can provide funds and demonstrate their intention to provide emotional and logistical support to refugee families for one year, thus enabling the absorption of refugees whom the government might not otherwise have been able to afford.<\/p>\n
Like many faith and neighborhood communities, Jewish communities, especially through synagogues, are on the frontlines of this effort.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not often that a rabbi\u2019s sermon gets reprinted in the daily newspaper of a major city, but such was the case for Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal\u2019s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom. \u201cFor too long, we have thought of religion in passive terms, counting how many people are sitting in the pews or paying dues,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAll this is necessary but not sufficient. I want us to count how many lives we change, how many people we help, how many hearts we touch.\u201d Her synagogue is sponsoring at least one refugee family.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a sermon delivered on Kol Nidre this year by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom in Vancouver helped capture the hearts and minds of his congregants. \u201cTonight, I want to ask you to do something great. I want to ask you to save a life, the life of a stranger \u2013 because we were once strangers in the land, because we are human beings and that is the only similarity that we really need.\u201d It didn\u2019t take long for the congregation to come up with the $40,000 necessary to sponsor a refugee family. They are now fundraising to bring a second. Other synagogues across the city \u2013 including the Jewish Renewal Or Shalom, which is sponsoring three families \u2013 have followed suit. (See story, page 1.)<\/p>\n
In Toronto, Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, one of nearly 100 organizations across the country that enjoys sponsorship agreement holder rights, has been flooded with sponsoring requests.<\/p>\n
I spoke to Ryan Friedman of Darchei Noam and to Pippa Feinstein of First Narayever Congregation, two Toronto-based synagogues that are sponsoring refugees. Feinstein in particular noted that, while wanting to \u201censure a safe place for any refugee family who is looking to come to Canada,\u201d her congregation is aiming to launch \u201cparallel awareness-raising activities\u201d around the plight of persecuted minorities in the region.<\/p>\n
Among those minorities are the Yazidi people of Iraq, who are being faced with a genocide \u2013 in the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights \u2013 at the hands of ISIS. In collaboration with other faith groups, Winnipeg\u2019s Jewish community has spearheaded an effort to sponsor multiple Yazidi refugees. As Belle Jarniewski described it, \u201cWhen I saw the article about the mass grave [of the Yazidis], I really responded to it viscerally. It reminded me that we keep talking every year \u201cnever again\u201d and, as Jews, we talk about this all the time, how important it is \u2026 and what are we doing about it?\u201d<\/p>\n
In my own city of Ottawa, Lori Rosove and Dara Lithwick of Temple Israel launched a community-wide effort to sponsor a refugee family. As Rosove explained it, \u201cIt\u2019s the human thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
I, too, have helped launch a cross-denominational grassroots sponsoring effort, working through both Jewish Family Services of Ottawa and the United Church of Canada. Since a handful of us gathered in a neighbor\u2019s living room in early September, we now number 250 participants and have raised $150,000 so far, enabling us to sponsor six families. So as to provide the suggested \u201csoft-landing\u201d that settlement agencies advise, each family will live with a neighborhood host for the first couple of months.<\/p>\n
And what of pushback from community members? Moskovitz explained that, while 95% of his congregants have been enthusiastic, a few were not. \u201cI met with each individual or group who registered a concern,\u201d explaining the \u201crigorous UN screening and the Canadian screening [process].\u201d<\/p>\n
For their part, American Jewish groups have been doing what they can. There was the statement of moral clarity issued by 10 Jewish organizations. And there is a rabbis\u2019 letter drafted by HIAS, urging their elected officials to \u201cwelcome the stranger.\u201d In addition to lobbying Congress to accept refugees and supporting local resettlement agencies in their efforts, the U.S.-based Religious Action Centre of Reform Judaism has taken the initiative to help American congregations partner with Canadian ones in order to support their neighbors\u2019 efforts. As RAC head Rabbi Jonah Pesner told me: \u201cTo sit at our [Passover] seder tables every year and [tell] the story, [starting with] \u2018my father was a wandering Aramean,\u2019 and to live through 5,000 years as a community of refugees, not to model for the world what it means to welcome the stranger would be an abdication of our legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, while the U.S. Congress wrings its hands over whether to accept a meagre 10,000 souls, Canada (one-tenth the population) has pledged to receive 25,000 Syrian refugees by February, of which 10,000 are expected to be sponsored privately. When private citizens are empowered to help people from across the globe, the bluster and rhetoric can be bypassed while the real work of saving lives and opening hearts can take place.<\/p>\n
Mira Sucharov<\/strong> is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at <\/em>Haaretz and the <\/em>Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While American political discourse around whether to accept Syrian refugees smolders under the embers of xenophobia, Canadians have been opening their hearts and their wallets to bring in Syrian refugees. Canada is one of the only countries with a private sponsorship option, which means that groups of ordinary citizens can provide funds and demonstrate their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3439,22,2708,1942,1325],"class_list":["post-16348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-dan-moskovitz","tag-or-shalom","tag-refugees","tag-syria","tag-temple-sholom"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}