AJWS has changed the landscape of Jewish service.
Twenty-five years ago, there were few international service opportunities designed specifically for Jews with aspirations of healing the world. But AJWS has led a renaissance of Jewish service, and to date, has sent 3,400 volunteers to work with grassroots organizations fighting poverty, hunger and disease around the world. On these “service-learning” trips, AJWS volunteers have made a lasting impact: They have helped build community centers, roads and schools; conducted research; improved health and hygiene; documented and protested human rights abuses and taught essential skills. At the same time, they have engaged deeply with the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, studying
AJWS’s service curriculum, Expanding the Universe of Obligation: Judaism, Justice and Global Responsibility. By learning about and contributing personally to global change, AJWS volunteers are applying the most fundamental Jewish
ideals of justice.
Since 1993, AJWS has sent 563 skilled Jewish professionals to serve for three months to a year with grassroots organizations around the globe. By taking time off from their careers to work intensively in developing countries, these volunteers use their professional skills to further the organizations’ work to promote sustainable development and human rights.
In 1994, AJWS began sending groups of Jewish young adults to spend a summer living and working with our grassroots partners. Nearly 600 high school and college students have participated since then, spending seven weeks volunteering in a developing country and the following year solidifying their commitment to global justice through an intensive domestic program.
In 2000, AJWS re-invented “spring break” as an opportunity for life-changing Jewish service. Over the past decade, AJWS has led more than 200 groups—including 1,660 college students from 61 universities—to Central America, Asia and Africa in partnership with Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and other campus organizations. The program has inspired budding young changemakers and helped jumpstart Jewish justice movements on campuses around the country.
In 2004, AJWS founded a competitive, 10-month international fellowship to prepare recent Jewish college graduates for careers in social justice. The program has since sent 82 extraordinary young people to India and Central America to make tangible, long-term contributions to development and human rights struggles.
Since 2004, AJWS has sent more than 200 rabbinical students and educators from 15 seminaries on service-learning trips to volunteer, grapple with ideas of justice and pluralism and strengthen their Jewish leadership. This program, funded by the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, has recently expanded to include U.S.-based workshops to help emerging leaders take global issues into synagogues and other institutions of American Jewish life.
AJWS provides opportunities for multi-generational community groups—often from synagogues and schools—to experience our volunteer service programs. More than 550 participants from Jewish communities around the country have traveled with AJWS to volunteer with grassroots organizations and deepen their commitment to Judaism and global change.
