Jewish Week - Repair One Corner

Sandee Brawarsky
December 30, 2005

Ruth Messinger wears two green “Save Darfur” bracelets at a time, at the suggestion of a young friend who does the same. She’ll hand one over to anyone who asks about it, just as she’ll speak about the issue whenever she can.

Messinger and the organization she has transformed, American Jewish World Service, have put Darfur and the genocide going on in the African country of Sudan on the Jewish communal agenda. AJWS has raised more than $1.3 million for humanitarian aid for Darfur.

For the 20-year-old AJWS, 2005 was its most successful, most active, year to date. Fundraising revenues have almost doubled in the last two years, and, in addition to its work on Darfur, the group has raised $11.2 million in aid for tsunami victims. During that time, AJWS has been increasingly in the public eye, as has Messinger, its president and executive director. Last January, she was the sole Jewish leader invited to the White House by President Bush for a meeting of heads of organizations doing relief work in the wake of the tsunami.

One year after the tsunami swept more than 220,000 lives into the sea, the AJWS is still closely involved with relief and reconstruction projects on the ground, and continues to plan how to best spend remaining funds over the next four years. So far it has made 64 grants to 50 grassroots organizations in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Somalia, allocating $2.6 million. Tied to the first anniversary, the AJWS recently invited a group of journalists to visit the southern coast of India and view its projects up close. (See story on page 16).

The organization’s rise to prominence is due, in part, to an unfortunate series of natural disasters around the world, which have resulted in AJWS becoming a recognized leader in disaster relief. It has also successfully tapped into a growing interest in social justice as a meaningful way to express Jewish identity.

This is not unlike the instinct that inspired Jews to civil rights activism in the 1960s. Involvement with AJWS is perhaps representative of a new phase of Jewish social activism and charitable giving, one that includes and also transcends the boundaries of localized Jewish concerns and Zionist imperatives, directed toward the world’s poorest peoples. These days, the phrase tikkun olam, understood as repairing the world — and a major theme of AJWS — has become common parlance for Jews.

Many people involved with AJWS and those observing from outside point to Messinger’s leadership as a critical factor in the organization’s growth and visibility, and the strength of its voice of conscience. Tirelessly, the 65-year-old executive travels around the country — in 2005 she spoke at more than 100 synagogues, college campuses and conferences — raising awareness about AJWS and its mission to provide support for grassroots social change projects to alleviate poverty, hunger and disease throughout the developing world.

“As long as there is poverty or oppression any place on earth, we are all from an underdeveloped world,” Messinger, a former New York City elected official and Democratic mayoral candidate, says often. “The challenge is to claim our global citizenship and work to put things right. We must each do what we can. Repair at least one corner of our world.”

Earlier this month, Messinger spoke in three synagogues about Darfur over one Shabbat: Friday night at Town and Village on the Lower East Side, and Shabbat morning on the Upper West Side, at an early study session at her own synagogue, Society for the Advancement of Judaism, and at the end of services at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. In a brief talk at B’nai Jeshurun, she wastes no words in urging congregants to raise their voices to save lives in Darfur, making references to Rwanda and other places where mass killings took place, while the world was silent.

“As Jews who know firsthand the consequences of silence from the international community, we must do all that we can to prevent or stop deliberate attempts to annihilate any people,” she states.

Then two days later, on a cold Monday night, she traveled by train to the Merrick Jewish Center on Long Island to speak about AJWS, which she describes as “the hand, heart and voice of the Jewish community in the developing world.” At the pulpit, she suggested that the words “we were slaves in Egypt’ would be hollow if Jews failed to act.

“We are a people who have known centuries of oppression, but who now know privilege and enjoy many freedoms. We have realized a level of affluence and influence our grandparents never imagined. The question is, what are we going to do with it to make change?” she asks.

Messinger’s Vision

Raising money from Jews for non-Jews in the developing world is something that Messinger has been doing a lot of since joining AJWS in 1998. The group’s budget has grown from $2.1 million in 1998 to an approved budget of $16.2 million for 2006. (Those numbers don’t reflect the $11.2 million in emergency funds raised after the tsunami and more than $1.3 million for humanitarian aid for Darfur.)

Messinger’s career path is unusual: She’s perhaps the only person to move from elected office to leading a national Jewish organization. Her profile — serious Jew, social activist, progressive thinker — made her a natural for the organization, founded in 1985 by Larry Philips and Larry Simon, along with a group of rabbis, communal leaders and business people who wanted to create a specifically Jewish way to channel funds to help the world’s neediest to help themselves.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, the author and scholar who has been involved since the early days and remains a member of the board of advisers, sees Messinger’s efforts in growing the organization as “a great vindication of our original vision.

“This organization increases the ways of peace between us and the rest of the world,” Rabbi Hertzberg commented.

“Ruth is absolutely driven, she has clarity of vision and she has moral courage,” said Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon of B’nai Jeshurun, a board member of AJWS since 2001, who noted that she is both well-respected and well-connected in the world, two qualities she has leveraged for the benefit of the organization.

“I believe that her vision emanates from her Jewishness, from her understanding of the tradition. She’s deeply involved in Jewish life and learning,” he said. “She doesn’t just happen to be Jewish.”

Messinger was first elected to the New York City Council, representing the Upper West Side, in 1978, and served until 1990; she was Manhattan borough president from 1990 to 1998. In 1997, she was the first woman nominated as Democratic candidate for mayor, but she lost to Rudolph Giuliani.

City Council member Gale A. Brewer, who served as Messinger’s chief of staff in the City Council for 12 years — and now represents Messinger’s former district — says that there was “nobody more intelligent in public service, who could bridge the gaps between policy and politics and understood the feelings and nuances of this city’s diverse population.”

Some say that Messinger runs AJWS as though running a political campaign, with great energy, focus and unrelenting willingness to speak about the organization and the issues it is committed to. People don’t forget her former life and even at a recent synagogue event, she was asked her opinions on the then pending New York City transit strike.

“My fundamental vision is about pursuing social justice,” Messinger told The Jewish Week. “I’ve always talked about pursuing greater social justice and greater economic democracy — that’s a long-term, lifelong vision, to use my professional skills and my connections and my organizing ability to get people to work toward realizing those goals and to understand, at least as I see it, that they have a moral obligation to be doing that work.”

When she’s not on the road, as she is almost weekly, she works out of a modest-sized office at AJWS headquarters, in a Manhattan neighborhood that’s still dominated by the garment business. Her walls are decorated with portrait photographs she’s taken in her travels in the developing world, along with a poster featuring Eleanor Roosevelt’s words. In a recent interview, Messinger said she is “very definitely” an admirer of the former first lady, quoting, “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.”

She was wearing a gold-threaded scarf, which comes from a trip to either Cambodia or India, she’s not certain, and she apologized for signing letters during the interview, and occasionally answering an e-mail. Messinger explained that she would be getting on a plane that afternoon and again the next day. But no matter how many things she seemed to be doing, she didn’t lose her train of thought and spoke with directness and earnestness. Being measured and passionate might not always go together, but Messinger seemed to be both about this cause.

After working on affairs related to New York’s five boroughs, she had to learn about international development. Staff members say that she’s always reading, keeping up with issues. Messinger makes a point of praising the staff.

“It has been exciting not only to grow the organization but to increasingly believe that the nature of the work we do is quite unusual, very focused on grassroots,” she said. “There’s every reason for us to be striving to do more.”

AJWS raises money for community-based groups working on HIV-AIDS care and prevention, child labor issues, economic development and health care, among other things. In 2005, the organization made more than 250 grants in 40 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Most grants range from $15,000 to $20,000, amounts that can go far toward effecting change in the developing world.

Staff members are becoming increasingly experienced with disasters. The tsunami struck on Dec. 26, and they made their first grant the following day. And money began coming in. Kate Kroeger, the senior program officer responsible for South Asia, describes postal service baskets overflowing with checks in the next days and weeks. Initially, they sent funds for immediate relief materials, like food, water and emergency shelter. Then Kroeger and colleagues began doing outreach to find local organizations helping communities rebuild, doing the kind of long-term reconstruction and development that AJWS supports.

“We spend for each disaster in a very planful way, over whatever time we think is necessary to be sure that we can spend it well,” Messinger explaieds. They decided early on to spend the money over five years, as they saw that too much of the money sent to the region — with good intentions from all over the world — was not being spent wisely enough.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee raised more than $18 million dollars for tsunami relief, and also was working on the ground within a week. So far, it has committed to programs costing $10 million and plans to allocate the rest of the funds over three years, according to Will Recant, assistant executive vice president. In some cases, the two organizations are partners in their efforts, and JDC officials also speak in terms of tikkun olam in describing their disaster and development efforts. In conversation, Recant agreed that a difference between the two groups is that AJWS works more on the grassroots level.

Social Justice And The Family

A third-generation New Yorker, Messinger dates her lifelong commitment to social justice to her childhood. Her maternal grandfather was the first executive director of the Jewish Federation of New York. Her father, who started his own accounting business, served on the board of the Jewish Home and Hospital for more than 50 years. And her mother, who had a long and distinguished career at the Jewish Theological Seminary, heading the communications department and producing the radio program “Eternal Light,” also served on several boards.

Through her mother’s work, Messinger got to know Rabbis Abraham Joshua Heschel, Louis Finkelstein and other Seminary figures, whom she cites as influences on her thinking. At Park Avenue Synagogue, where she went to Hebrew school, she was the first bat mitzvah. She attended Manhattan’s Brearley School, and went on to graduate from Radcliffe and the University of Oklahoma, where she received a master’s degree in social work in 1964. Last spring, she received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College.

A visiting professor at Hunter College where she teaches urban policy, Messinger lives on the Upper West Side, a neighborhood where she’s recognized frequently, whether walking down Broadway or riding her bicycle in Central Park. Married to Andrew Lachman, who directs an educational foundation, she has three children from her first marriage, along with seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Family photos dot her office.

Messinger is asked regularly why the organization doesn’t get involved in Israel, to lend its expertise to help fight poverty there, and she answers that others are doing that work well, pointing to organizations like the New Israel Fund and the Abraham Fund. “It’s not on our docket,” she says, explaining that, since its inception, AJWS has been committed to helping nations that fall into the poorest third of the world. An exception is the group’s work in Russia and Ukraine, where it supports grassroots Jewish renewal and human rights programs. In 1996, AJWS took over the Jewish Community Development Fund, and this is the only program area directed toward Jews, supported not from general funds but from restricted funding from donors.

In the philanthropic world, the organization gets high marks, a four-star (highest) rating from Charity Navigator and an “A” rating by the American Institute of Philanthropy. In a recent survey of its donors, AJWS found that a majority of them belong to and give money to their synagogues and local federations.

Messinger is proud of the legion of volunteers who fan out over the developing world, lending their professional skills. She refers to the Volunteer Corps as a kind of Jewish Peace Corps. As she explains, the communities receive much needed technical assistance and also develop a new understanding of Judaism – “and come to see Jews in the way we want to be seen, as caring about social justice.”

The volunteer programs also afford college students opportunities to do physical labor, accompanied by Jewish study, on site with various project partners for summers and also on college breaks. This January will be the third time a delegation of rabbinical students from seminaries across the denominations will travel together to El Salvador to work with members of the local community. And for the first time, AJWS is partnering with Hillel to sponsor college student delegations.

“This is the way you engage young people who are inherently interested in changing the world for the better — we have the opportunity in a Jewish context to do that,” says Marty Friedman, who has chaired AJWS for the last four years.

Friedman sees much untapped growth potential, as the organization becomes more widely known in the Jewish community. An investment banker, he turns to the language of business, “We haven’t penetrated our market yet.” Still, he says if the organization were three times as large, it would still be making small grants, just more of them.

Messinger likes to quote AJWS board member, Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and author of “The End of Poverty,” who describes the people served as not even reaching the lowest rung on the economic ladder. She rattles off statistics about the colossal numbers of children in the world who go to bed hungry and those who lack clean water, and suggests that even as that such news is confounding, it demands outrage and action.

“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed,” Messinger says.