Stand Up Elder and Board Chair from 1998 - 2009, Ric Benjamin, reflects on Stand Up at 30 - the people, the actions, and the meaning behind those actions.
On 29 July 1994 the Australian Jewish News reported Mark Baker as the spokesperson for a newly launched appeal to support the refugees from the Rwandan genocide, called ‘Keshet’. The new organisation aimed to give expression to the Jewish ethic of active Tzedakah (justice) by providing an ongoing fund for humanitarian relief. He then went on to say that, “Jews understand all too well what Elie Wiesel means when he says the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference”. And with that Keshet/Jewish Aid Australia/Stand Up was born!
I was not there in 1994, but I was inspired. Having been committed to social change since my teenage years at Hashomer Hatzair, I was busy with work and young children in 1994, but by early 1997 I was wanting to do more, so I rang Arnold Shmerling (a friend of a friend) to ask him about Keshet.
Around the Kitchen Table
My introduction to Keshet was joining a group of people sitting around the kitchen table at Lane and Arnold Shmerling’s home.
The two most striking things about this group was that the first 30 minutes of every meeting was spent catching up, laughing, gossiping and eating; and that by the end of was always a rather long (3 hours plus!) meeting; we always had an agreed activity or school program or fundraiser that would stir us into action for the following month with additional hours of collective work to make things happen.
We were all committed to helping each other, funding activities out of our own pockets, with the goal of making a personal difference to someone else’s life.
Back then our approach to humanitarian development work had what I would call a ‘grassroots’ definition about it – we decided towards the end of each year what the project for the following year would be. In this way we have run programs for:
’95 for homeless youth
’96 Koori education and cross-cultural activities
’97 Foster Care
’98 Focus on PNG (drought, then tsunami)
’99 Breaking isolation of the elderly
In the early years we also focussed on fundraising for the unfortunately all too frequent international disasters. The manmade disasters of Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo, etc created refugee crises that resonated deeply with the Australian Jewish community. The natural disasters of flood, drought and earthquake also punctuated those early years and were also generously supported by our community.
In late 1998 I took on the responsibility of President and by the end of 1999 I reflected on our current approach and saw that we weren’t maximising the amount of good we could do because the relationships and programs we spent 12 months developing were not continued.
With everyone’s agreement we started a new approach, pursuing long term partnerships with other agencies, starting with Hanover Welfare Services. Our basic premise to potential partners was this – you have funding and staff to do many things, but what is on your wish list due to lack of resources?
I put that question to George Guliani, then the Manager of Hanover Family Services and through his guidance and friendship we developed some cornerstone programs that we have used as models with our other partners ever since. The two most enduring cornerstone programs were tutoring and family outings.
To this day I still tell people of George’s insights that have helped shape my view of our impact:
1. That as a society we underestimate the power of positive family memories as helping shape us a healthy, resilient adults – so creating positive family moments during a social outing is more than an afternoon away from the worries of the day-to-day; and
2. That there is a strong social value attached to tutoring, as a form of mentoring and being a role model – particularly for kids who have gone through not only geographic dislocation, but also social dislocation through the process of homelessness.
As a side note, the tutoring program came about through the energy of Thea Snow, while the family outings started with some familiar board and Elder names: Lane Shmerling, Chooch Takac, Ros Loff and Ruth Belelli.
A Food Rescue Movement Begins: FareShare is Born
In late 2000 activities took a profound step up through an initiative by Stephen Kolt. He met our ‘kitchen cabinet’ and proceeded to tell us all about an amazing organisation in New York who collected food from simchas and distributed them to the hungry and homeless.
We loved the idea and saw an immediate attraction to having something like this happen in Melbourne. Because they were called New York City Harvest, we launched Melbourne City Harvest – contacting caterers and rabbis, telling them about what we did and how we could have volunteers come at 1am to collect unserved food that was left over.
Steven, together with other well known Elders, Paul Kron, John Lange and Lane and Arnold took on the responsibility of collection and late night runs – delivering the food to Hanover’s emergency accommodation centre in South Melbourne.
Interestingly, we were not the only ones with this idea – and unbeknown to us another organisation called One Umbrella started on the other side of town at the same time also rescuing food, but their method of distribution was to turn the food into pies and distribute them as ready-to-eat meals.
We saw the two programs as complementary and so offered to provide the initial seed funding for a merged entity and with additional support from the Pratt Foundation, we created an amazing organisation which today is called Fare Share and which is hoping this year to make 1 million meals!
2001 also saw Keshet participate in our first global Jewish Humanitarian conference. I could not attend in New York, so at 3am I linked in by phone and talked to representatives from organisations from the US, Canada, the UK and Israel about the activities of Keshet as they clicked through the PowerPoint slides I had sent earlier.
Our Profile Increases: from Keshet to Jewish Aid
Our increasing profile and participation with non-Jewish partner agencies started to show us an interesting phenomenon – people didn’t get the word ‘Keshet’. So we changed our name to make our mission more easily understood and 2002 we became Jewish Aid Australia.
In 2002 we made our first direct attempt at our first international development engagement through a relationship with the communities of East Timor led by Bek Barson as part of the City of Port Phillip’s Friends of Suai. While this did not lead to a new program area for us, it was valuable in helping us define what we were good at, what we could best achieve and what our community most wanted from us.
In 2004, after 10 years of work on a purely volunteer basis, we began to feel the strain of our success. So we decided to seek funding for a part time Programs Coordinator. Through the generosity of Yoav Schwalb and his family we secured enough funding for a part time position for two years
Lisa Buchner was our first employee and a stalwart for the organisation for many years. Lisa carried a huge burden. No matter how much work all us volunteers put in, little would have happened if it were not for the daily efforts of Lisa to pick up our ideas, find the volunteers, squeeze a donation out of an unsuspecting supplier, schlep her family across town as helpers and greet everyone with a smile.
In 2005 we began work with the African refugee communities of Melbourne – first through CentaCARE Sunshine and more recently with the Darfur and Nuba Mountain communities in Dandenong.
By 2006, the executives of myself, Arnold, Sandy Dudakov, Ros Loff and Bek Barson agreed that if we were to become a significant voice in the Australian Jewish community we needed to continue to evolve. From 2006 to 2007 we undertook a strategic review process. Sandy, Bek and Ros stepped down from the Board and Thea Snow and Danny Almagor joined.
With a re-energised vision for our future we began fast tracking our evolution.
Jewish Aid Strengthens and Enters a New Phase
In 2008 Danny and I took on the responsibility of recruiting a broader, more experienced Board and I am very pleased to have had Lindy Blashki, Karen Mahlab and Jason Gerrard as ‘co-conspirators’ who helped strengthen the organisation and raise enough funds to employ our inaugural CEO, Gary Samowitz.
Gary’s employment is the catalyst for me to step down as President and for Danny to complete the board transition as the now Chair of the board. My role over those 11 years had been as de facto CEO. A difficult and very fulfilling job on top of my actual full time job! Working closely with Lisa, the Board and volunteers to make Keshet/Jewish Aid a credible, professional and permanent fixture in the Australian Jewish community.
My goal as President for Keshet/Jewish Aid was always to leave it in a better place than when I joined it. To me that meant making it more resilient, more professional, more widely known and most importantly a welcomed and respected new voice within the Australian Jewish community.
Lisa’s amazing work within the Sudanese refugee communities of Melbourne began to clarify where we could make a meaningful impact. When Gary brought Derech Eretz to its new home (having initially been a program run out of the University of NSW) it ‘completed the circle’ of core programming that still defines us today at 30.
Three powerful memories of my time at Keshet/Jewish Aid:
1. A note written on the back of a cheque for $10 for our appeal for Kosovo refugees in 2000. The women was an elderly Holocaust survivor and she wrote, “I am so pleased to be donating to help the refugees of Kosovo, imagine what could have happened if the world had stood up for us like this in our time of need”.
2. A note by an American online donor to our bushfire appeal earlier this year who said “As an American Jew from New Orleans, I witnessed first-hand this kind of tragedy...and how the Jewish Community of the world came to our aid. This is who we are as a people!”
3. A comment made by a volunteer who lives on the other side of Melbourne and who had never associated with any element of the Jewish community, but was heavily involved in broader community work. Her comment was that if by doing humanitarian work she was fulfilling obligations and expectations rooted in the Jewish tradition, she was now proud to call herself Jewish.
Finally, a note about what I believe is at the core of what Keshet/Jewish Aid/Stand Up represents. Both are aspects of what I called a “connected society”.
I believe we break down community stereotypes by bringing people from diverse backgrounds together as individuals to connect and share a moment. For some that moment is a shared meal in the park after a social outing, while for others it is a series of moments as they work together as tutor and student over the course of a year
I also believe that we are a catalyst by encouraging people to act on their desires to be a part of something bigger than themselves and through that connection realise that the risk and reward of creative thinking has a snowball effect on others
I remain a proud Elder of the organisation and a passionate believer in the power of the individual to make a difference and to be positively changed through that work.
Clearly I see Stand Up as a transformative organisation – not that it makes non-believers into believers, but it turns believers into doers.
Ric Benjamin