1.What have the people and communities behind the Jewish Justice Centre achieved so far?

Over the past seven years, Jewish communities across four denominations have been participating in justice work, by partnering with other organisations in their local areas and investing in community organising through Citizens UK. During that time we have taken steps towards a more just world. Together with our partners, 700 Syrian refugees have been resettled through the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme as a direct result of synagogues’ action; the Jewish community have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring 100 unaccompanied minors to the UK through the work of Safe Passage, two national synagogal movements have become Living Wage employers, over 2000 employees were raised out of working poverty, mental health support for 16 and 17 year-olds that bridge the gap between children and adults’ services in in Europe’s largest local authority have been created, over 10,000 people have won improvements in social care services, and we have ensured a new government scheme – Community Sponsorship – that pays tribute to the legacy of the kindertransport – and resettled two refugee families directly through it.

2. Why now?

After having achieved so much in the last seven years, the Jewish Justice Centre takes our commitment to the next level. Together, we will build a more fair, just, and compassionate world for ourselves and the generations to come:

Because our community - of all political stripes - are troubled by the political landscape of our country at the moment and want to engage in some of the most pressing issues facing our nation.
Because many of our Jewish organisations are already channelling their concern into creating programmes to deal with the symptoms of injustice – food banks, drop in centres, asylum seeker support services and homeless shelters – and want to go further to tackle the root causes and systemic problems underneath this.
Because in addition to winning on specific campaigns, we know that we need to reweave the relationships that underpin our democracy – building relationships across lines of race, religion, region and class, and deepening relationships between Jews and other communities.
Because at this juncture, with almost 15 Jewish communities from the north of England to the Sussex coast part of or exploring broad based alliances acting for justice, and a string of high profile wins behind us, we’ve trialed and learned what works best for Jewish communities to successfully engage in justice work – and built the relationships and trust to do so
Because having proven this can work, to take our impact to the next level, we need an ambitious partnership at the national level.

3. What’s the difference between social justice and social action?

Imagine walking into a room where a tap has been left running and the sink is overflowing. In social action, we see problems and we try to alleviate their symptoms – in this analogy, we’d grab a mop and dry the floor. In social justice, we see the problem and try and solve its cause – we work to turn off the tap.

The Jewish Justice Centre is primarily focused on building social justice, not social action – not only dealing with the impact of problems, but trying to change their cause. Instead of food banks that serve the majority of people in poverty who are in work, we challenge the root cause through the Living Wage. Rather than build drop in centres for destitute asylum seekers, we act to change government policy to allow people to build a new life with dignity. Judaism commands us to do both social action and social justice – in the words of Isaiah, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and break the chains that keep people in those situations. Our key stone story as a Jewish community– the Exodus – is a story about the need to challenge root causes of suffering. Salvation comes not in providing a food bank for the Israelites, but in freeing them.

Ruth Messinger, an American Jewish social justice leader, has explained social justice in a Jewish context in the following way:

Social justice is a particular type of response to the suffering, indignity, and inequity in our lives and in the larger world. It is different from a service response. It draws from text, from history, and from vision to remind us that people don’t need to live this way—that we can make our economy, our society, and our global community better for ever larger numbers of us if we work together to change our laws and our culture. Social justice work goes beyond addressing short-term, immediate needs and identifies structural causes of injustice that people can and, we believe, must work to change. The idea of social justice is rooted in Jewish teachings that convey unambiguously that we are obliged to care for the other and pursue justice, that we have a responsibility to address injustice and inequality in the communities and the society in which we live. It is further rooted in a belief in the essential dignity of all human beings and strives to realise that vision locally and all over the world. Over long periods of time social justice writers and activists have argued that for us to do this work well we must hold our governments and their leaders accountable and be prepared to pursue systems change.

4. I already participate in social justice as an individual Jew – what is the benefit of doing it via my synagogue or youth movement?

It’s brilliant that you participate in justice work already – Kol HaKavod! (All the respect). We think it’s important that Jewish organisations (synagogues, schools, youth movements, care homes, etc) take part in justice work as well. Why? Well, partly because we think that living a Jewish life happens in community – we dance in circles, pray in minyanim, study in chavruta. But also, there are really strategic and practical reasons why we want justice to become an organisational practise as common as learning or prayer. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs writes in her excellent book, Where Justice Dwells:

Engaging our institutions in justice work creates a space in which we can live full and integrated Jewish lives. Our prayers sustain and inspire our actions, and our actions take prayers and texts off the pages and into real life
Justice work builds community. Through engaging in a collective project that draws on individuals’ passions and talents, community members become more deeply involved in one another’s lives. They celebrate victories – both communal and personal – together, and mourn personal and collective losses as one.
Religious institutions have power. When private individuals or community groups speak, public officials sometimes pay attention but often do not. Few public officials, however, will outright ignore prominent religious institutions or coalitions of congregations.
Through our institutions, we show up publicly as Jews. When I do volunteer work or activism as an individual, I might mention that I am Jewish, or even that I am a rabbi. When I write a cheque to an organisation, it is possible that the recipient wonders whether Jacobs is a Jewish name. But when an identifiably Jewish institution takes on an issue, it is clear that this action is a Jewish response. Such institutional action helps us to build relationships with non Jewish partners, to raise the profile of the Jewish community as one dedicated to social justice, and to define issues important to our communities as “Jewish issues”.
Through being public Jews, we can bring Jewish wisdom into the public discourse. The centuries of Jewish discussion about interpersonal relations, the creation of a just society, and the responsibilities of the individual and the community to one another include significant wisdom about creating a better world. As Jews, we can contribute this wisdom to the public discourse, while also learning from the best of the wisdom of other religions and of secular thinkers

5. How do we measure success?

Knowing what we’re counting is important. We measure our justice work in the following criteria:

Have we made real measurable change that solves actual people’s actual suffering?
Has this work allowed us to build relationships and work across lines of difference (race, religion, class…)?
Has this work deepened what it means to be Jewish and part of a Jewish community - have we deepened our relationship with ourselves and built our sense of what a synagogue or movement or British Jewish community can do?

6. What does the work with Jewish communities for justice look like?

If you are a Jewish community who want to be effective in making tikkun olam, we're here to work with you to make it happen! We partner with communities who are committing to act for justice across lines of difference with training, sessions to reflect on Jewish views on justice, support and introductory meals with local communities in your area who want to act for justice too, a curriculum and methodology on how to make change, and support for public action. Working with Jewish organising, communities across the country have resettled hundreds of refugees, raised the salary of thousands of low paid workers, and improved mental health support for teenagers.

We partner with Jewish communities to help congregations come together, initiate important and sometimes challenging conversations about the type of social justice work that best fits their community, build partnerships, alliances, and power with other communities in their local area, identify the issues facing people’s lives that people want to act on, map power and available resources to discern where to focus efforts for the greatest possible impact, train communities to take effective action, and coach them through the process of taking action. We help Jewish communities become vehicles of social change – and take their role in facing the most pressing issues facing our country.

Sometimes the work is better told through stories. One such story is our Sanctuary Succot campaign of 2015.

We built a Sanctuary Succot action strategy with five Liberal synagogues who wanted to resettle Syrian refugees, the summer before Aylan Kurdi’s death. The government policy to resettle Syrian refugees – Syrian Vulnerable People’s Resettlement Programme – was the most highly funded refugee resettlement plan in the world, but local authorities were still not signing up to it. We built a plan to change this. Finchley Progressive Synagogue, already a member of a local alliance of community groups known as Barnet Citizens, hosted a meeting in July with 27 members from their own synagogue, two different local Muslim communities, a university students’ union, Jewish youth movement, and a nearby school. Together the group worked out an ambitious but achievable win - to try and persuade their local authority to sign up to the scheme, and resettle 50 Syrian refugees in a borough of almost 400,000 people. We mapped out what it would take to win – finding homes that would be rentable at housing benefit (DSS) rate, demonstrating popular support for the policy, committing to support the families’ resettlement. We built teams to work on each of those things, set a date for a public action of erev succot, and met the local Council beforehand to share our plans and understand where they stood and begin negotiating. On erev succot, 200 people – Jews and members of the local community partners - came to Finchley Progressive Synagogue. Rabbi Rebecca Birk stood on the bima, welcomed the Leader of the Council, and told him he was an honoured guest and we would ask him for his position at the end, but we weren’t going to ask for something without showing our work first. A synagogue member continued by sharing that this night was the first night of Succot, and how on Succot Jewish communities think about temporary shelter, instability, and what it means to not be protected or safe. A second synagogue member shared their family’s experience of being refugees in England, and why the story of needing sanctuary was so important and as a part of succot, where we welcome ushpizin, or guests. Then a young woman from a local Muslim community stood up, and spoke about her fiancé, a doctor, who had been tortured by the Syrian government when working as a medic, and was now in Lebanon and seeking refuge. She explained the conflict and why so many people need refuge, and why a small number are being prioritised to come to the UK. We explained the policy and what we were trying to support the local authority to do. Then we shared the work we’d done to get to this point. Five landlords came up to the bima and said they would rent their private property at DSS rates to the refugees if the Council let them in – ending the fear of vulnerable people locally and vulnerable people further away fighting for precious resources by competing over council housing. Headteachers stood and said that they could find places for children in their schools if the Council signed up the scheme. Then local doctors’ surgeries joined the bima to explain they would register the refugees at their practises if the Council let them in. Finally a team of people stood up to explain how they would help support pathways to work if the refugees were allowed in.

At the end, Cllr Cornelius, the Leader of Barnet Council, stood infront of the congregation and announced – Rabbi, the answer is yes! He gave an interview to Sky News that afternoon crediting the campaign as the reason he had said yes. 50 refugees did indeed resettle in Barnet, and the alliance of communities who worked together to ensure they could come continued to work together to welcome them. The local school hosted a welcome party. The synagogue hosted a weekly ‘coffee morning’ with white goods, clothing, and an English lesson. The university offered free places to retrain for those refugees who met the English requirements for a degree – and a special support course in academic English to one who was close to the level but not at it. The refugees are now at home, in Barnet – and the synagogue got to have one of its most meaningful festivals that built relationships with other communities, taught them how to act and win for their values, and brought the meaning of the festival alive.

7. What does the work with Jewish communities for congregational renewal look like?

Our Congregational Development Centre equips Jewish communities to develop a culture of leadership and participation – and to build strong communities that can be bedrocks of transformed neighbourhoods. We work with synagogues to revitalise a particular and specific area of their community or to a specific project. Partnering with a team from the community, we embed an organiser with a community for approximately 2 days a month, and train the team to either change a specific aspect of the community's culture to become more relational (eg improving new member journeys) or to enact our specialised programme of growth either in numbers or participation. Pilot communities who have been on this programme have used it to increase membership by 40%, and improved their cheder, new members process, and bnei mitzvah programme.

8. Why do congregational renewal and justice go together?

We think of our training as a fractal – the same habits that can be used to build participation in a synagogue and relationships between members can be used to build power across a local area to act on the issues people care about. Organising is a set of practises – and it’s the same practises, used in different ways, that build both congregational renewal and justice work. The training we provide is from the Civil Rights Movement’s own training curriculum, originally given at the Highlander Centre, linked the two practises as well – because in order to have strong enough participation in broader justice work, communities themselves needed to be strong. In addition, justice and congregational renewal go together in a number of practical ways - we want to build strong communities that can be bedrocks of transformed neighbourhoods, and communities to be able to act for justice on the issues that matter to their members, they need to know their members, what matters to them, and have other members know them too.

9. What’s the budget for the Jewish Justice Centre and how is it funded?

The JJC's funding model aims to be diverse, grassroots led, and sustainable. We want to demonstrate the support we receive from others in the Jewish community and the value we bring to it. Over the past five years we have received almost £400,000 from Jewish communal organisations who have found our work meaningful and rooted in their own synagogue organisations. Our funding is a mixture of grants, donations, partnership contracts and training.

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