Jewish Immigrant Justice Organizing Initiative

After 9/11, JFREJ launched an immigrant justice campaign in coalition with ally organizations in response to the attacks on immigrants all over the city and the country, and the Jewish Immigrant Justice (JIJ) campaign emerged. JFREJ members, staff and board decided that as a progressive Jewish organization doing immigrant justice work JFREJ should also prioritize supporting organizing in Jewish immigrant communities.

Members of the JIJ working group have spent the last year and a half engaging in one-to-one relationship-building conversations with Jewish immigrant communities all over the city, and mapping the issues and information that have come out of these conversations. As of the summer of 2005, the JIJ is deepening its relationship with the Russian Jewish community in Bensonhurst and other parts of south Brooklyn, working toward supporting community organizing efforts. The JIJ will continue to build relationships with and support the organizing of immigrant Jews who are directly affected by racism and xenophobia in the post-9/11 climate to build their leadership and power to take on a local organizing campaigns.

JIJ’s Goals

• Support Jewish immigrants to organize in their own communities
• Support or fight legislation that directly affects Jewish and non-Jewish immigrant communities
• Engage JFREJ membership in immigrant justice struggles and in
• Build JFREJ and a progressive Jewish movement that prioritizes immigrant justice and is made up of Jewish immigrant and non-immigrant communities
  

Jewish Immigrant Justice: History and Accomplishments:

JIJ members conducted over 50 one to one meetings with members and leaders of Jewish immigrant communities and organizations around New York City. Conversations with Ethiopian, Bukharian, Russian, Yemeni, Iranian, Syrian, Israeli, Georgian and Egyptian Jews resulted in new relationships and co-organized meetings and events, including:

• A Shabbat dinner with BINA, an Ethiopian Jewish organization
  
• A Living Room Meeting with Russian Jewish youth at the Jewish
  Community House of Bensonhurst
  
• Work in partnership with Jews of color organizations. (We see racism and xenophobia working hand-in-hand to oppress immigrants; while the issues facing U.S.-born Jews of color are not the same as those affecting Jewish immigrants, JFREJ continues to fight the structural racism – within and without the Jewish community – that fuels these oppressions.) These have included holiday events and trainings, and Shabbat dinners.
  
• A meeting with ESL teachers to come up with ways to integrate political education into their curriculum and to provide extra-curricular spaces for students to organize around issues affecting their community
  
• Participation in and support for SEIU 1199’s campaign to protest unjust labor practices at Special Touch Home Care Services. Many of these workers are the Russian Jewish immigrants with whom JFREJ has been meeting.

The JIJ has also continued to work in coalition to support immigrant justice work throughout the city, to turn JFREJ members out to important immigrant and racial justice actions, and to work and on legislation that directly affects immigrant communities. Current ally groups include DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), Families for Freedom and the Center for Immigrant Families. JFREJ is also a member of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Resources

Fact Sheet on Immigrant Detention

An Abbreviated Timeline of Jewish Immigration

Reading List on Jewish Diversity

Articles

"A Real Mess: Iranian Jews and Muslims Detained in Los Angeles" (from The Iranian, December 20th, 2002)

"Dozens of Israeli Jews are Being Kept in Federal Detention" (from the New York Times, November 21, 2001)

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