Social Action at HBT
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Social Action has been a priority at Holy Blossom Temple since the mid-1800s. Projects in our Temple over the years have included women’s rights, civil rights, interfaith activity, support of migrant farm workers, Vietnamese boat people, Toronto homeless people, people afflicted with AIDS, and much more. Our work has involved advocacy, direct services to those in need, education, raising the awareness of our own community about the needs of vulnerable people all over the world. The guiding principles behind our actions are “tikkun olam” and g’milut hasidim” to “repair the world through acts of loving kindness”.
While our efforts have helped large numbers of those in need, we are also meeting a need in our own community. In November 2009, Craig Kielburger, who with his brother, Marc, won the W. Gunther Plaut Humanitarian Award for 2009, said that “the greatest challenge of our time is that we are raising a generation that so often closes their eyes and hearts to the suffering of others”.
We ask you to please take 5 minutes to watch a video. We hope it will excite you to join our Social Action Committee.
In 2007 a group of Holy Blossom members and non-members came together to re-ignite the interest in social action at Holy Blossom. The committee has grown to about 30 members, with two co-chairs, Gerri Richman and Dr. Gordon Arbess and our rabbinic sponsor, Rabbi Yael Splansky. For 2010 we have decided on four main initiatives, four small sub-committees, each with a member/leader.
Please look at the four streams and see where you might like to be involved.
Four Streams of Social Involvement
Supporting Youth in the Lawrence Heights Community, a tutoring program
Working with Pathways to Education Canada, Holy Blossom Temple Social Action Committee promotes a tutoring program in the Lawrence Heights community. Individuals from Holy Blossom congregation volunteer as tutors in five core subjects during the four evenings a week program. Congregants are sought to volunteer one or more times a week. Teaching experience or lesson planning experience is not necessary.
The Lawrence Heights area is a community of ethnic and linguistic diversity, including many first generation newcomers from East and West Africa as well as Caribbean and Latin American countries. Volunteers are greatly appreciated. For more information, please click here to send an email to Rachel Sommers.
Supporting and Advocating for Darfur, many approaches to finding an end to genocide
For several years, all over North America, humanitarian aid groups, relief agencies Jewish and non-Jewish, social action groups, and concerned individuals, have worked to lobby their governments and raise awareness to end the genocide in Darfur. Governments have been slow or stalled. Many people from almost every synagogue in Toronto know about the horrors of Darfur, that displacement, rape, organized starvation, and mass murder, are happening to millions of people, while we go on with our lives, that the genocide in Darfur has claimed at least 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. Many people know that the Khartoum government has banished aid groups and relief agencies from the refugee camps, leaving millions of people suffering from disease, lack of food, clean water, and total poverty.
So what can we do to make a difference in Darfur?
This year’s agenda for our sub-committee starts with promoting a very affective film, Darfur, starring Billy Zane, Edward Furlong, and Kristana Loken, which is scheduled to play across Canada in February, 2010. The film is an engaging story of western journalists caught in Sudan when the Janjaweed are coming to slaughter the inhabitants of a small village. It is a film for adults, which includes difficult scenes of violence. Please visit Stand Canada for more information and find a way to see this film and recommend it to others.
A phone call to 1-800-GENOCIDE (436-6243) is one of the ways to incite action concerning Darfur on the part of our government. Please call to let our government know that you demand to see an end to genocide and that your demand includes that humanitarian aid groups be allowed to return to Darfur immediately.
Supporting the Building of a Girls’ High School in Kenya
The Gunther W Plaut Humanitarian Award this year went to Craig and Marc Kielburger. Craig is pictured above autographing his book. The work in Kenya of their organization, Free the Children, plus the inspiring, informative, colorful, evening “marketplace” at the Temple, has moved the involvement of the Social Action Committee to support the needs and education of Kenyan girls.
The Social Action Committee, with the help of the Free the Children organization plans to participate in many ways in the building and reaching out to the students of a residential high school for girls, the first of its kind in Kenya. The girls will come from the village of Enelerai and neighbouring communities in Narok South district. Many are AIDS orphans or themselves infected with HIV or AIDS.
We are discussing ways to build our congregation’s awareness of the issues in Kenya, to organize grassroots activities to raise funds for the school; to provide an ongoing emotional, real connection between Holy Blossom and the girls who will attend the school, and to encourage congregants to travel to Kenya in the summer of 2010 to build the school with our own labour.
Supporting Refugees in Israel
The majority of the estimated 17,000 refugees in Israel are from Eritrea and Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast. Since 2007, many of these refugees have been detained in prisons. Many are released into the Israeli city centers without much in the way of assistance and access to services such as health care, housing, education, and employment.
The Social Action Committee is investigating ways to help these refugees.
If you would like to help us with any of these four initiatives, to offer aid of any kind or join our group, please click here to our chair Gerri Richman.
Please watch this site for updates about our initiatives and for our Honourable Menschen feature, telling you about the work of our individual members.
