The devastation of last Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal is just beginning to sink in. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25th was the worst quake to hit the country since 1934. Eyewitnesses report that historic buildings, including seven major temples, have been destroyed near Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and the force of the quake …
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Ebola from the front lines: AJWS’s Liberia consultant reflects on the crisis and AJWS’s work to stop it Dayugar Johnson (“D.J.”), AJWS’s in-country consultant in Liberia, imposed a quarantine on his family soon after the Ebola epidemic struck their neighborhood in Monrovia last year. He was especially strict with his children. “If you leave,” he warned …
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Monte Dube is a member of the AJWS Board of Trustees. He joined the board in June 2011. It hurts me when people suffer in the world. It feels personal. My late father, Heshy Dube, was just a teenager when he last saw his parents and his older brother before they perished in the Holocaust. …
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On March 4, 2015, AJWS president Ruth Messinger joined a panel of distinguished guests, including Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church and Katherine Marshall of World Faiths Development Dialogue, who each spoke about the relationship between religious proselytism and development at a forum hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown …
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Originally published by Quorum, a project of The Daily Beast. On Human Rights Day in December 2014, activists from around the world gathered at The Daily Beast’s “#Quorum: Global LGBT Voices” to share their struggles and achievements in working for LGBT rights worldwide. Essy, a Kenyan activist who works for AJWS grantee Persons Marginalized and …
Read MoreThe Jewish people are approaching the culmination of the Exodus experience—the long-awaited fulfillment of the promise to the Patriarchs that their children would one day inherit the Land of Canaan. They are camped right at the border when the now-ominous words that open Parshat Shlach appear—“Send for yourself men to spy out the land of …
Read MoreAt the beginning of Parshat Bamidbar, God asks Moses to “take a census of the whole Israelite community”[1] in the desert as a prelude to the people’s eventual entry into the Land of Israel. The Hebrew word for community, edah, is most often used to mean the entire nation;[2] but here, rather than serving as …
Read MoreThis week’s portion opens with a friendly, wizened face. Yitro—priest of Midian, father-in-law of Moses—emerges from the wilderness, daughter and grandsons in tow. After hearing of Israel’s liberation, the priest has come to reunite Moses with the family he had previously sent away. Moses’s delight in seeing Yitro is palpable. The text is suffused with …
Read MoreI arched my head back and looked up at a tower of nearly 9,000 human skulls. Rising 62 meters into the air, stacked and piled and encased in glass, the skulls belonged to Cambodians murdered during the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.[1] This upsetting memorial now stands in the infamous “Killing Fields,” where …
Read MoreParshat Vaera describes part of perhaps the most famous narrative in Jewish history—the Exodus. Moshe and Aharon were appointed as Divine emissaries to Pharaoh, demanding the release of the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt. Refused, Moshe and Aharon were then tasked with bringing plagues upon Egypt, ostensibly to compel Pharaoh to release the Jewish …
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