They spoke of genocide and “Never Again.” They pushed to divest from entities that supported the offending government.

They protested the government’s blockade of humanitarian aid to the disputed region. They were arrested while protesting outside of an embassy.

The thousands of Jews who bused and flew to the National Mall from across the country on April 30, 2006 to call for these things fought on a platform that would be instantly recognizable to today’s pro-Palestinian protesters. But they were not there for Gaza. They were there for Darfur.

“Our halacha dictates that we help save lives,” Rebecca Stone, a Yeshiva University student who organized a fleet of buses from the Modern Orthodox school, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time, referring to Jewish law. “Apathy is really antithetical to Torah values.”

The Save Darfur Coalition sprung into being in the mid-2000s in response to the haunting spike in murders orchestrated by Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, whose Arab Islamist government waged a civil war against ethnic African tribes in the country’s Darfur region. They would eventually kill an estimated 300,000 civilians and displace another 2.7 million.

Many of the coalition’s loudest voices were Jewish, and cited what they saw as a uniquely Jewish imperative to prevent genocide. Together, they worked to elevate Darfur as a significant foreign policy issue.

“The American Jewish community has been absolutely vital in uplifting the issue of Darfur, the crisis in Darfur, and the situation in Sudan in general in the American consciousness,” Noah Gottschalk, chief external relations officer for the Jewish immigrant aid group HIAS, said in a recent interview. “When you look at the organizations that were founded in the aftermath of the genocide in 2003, so many Jewish organizations were part of that.”

Today, six years after the end of al-Bashir’s reign and 14 years after the founding of South Sudan as an independent country, Darfur is again descending into chaos as the RSF, Sudan’s government-backed paramilitary forces, have laid siege to the town of el-Fasher. More than 150,000 people have been killed, and another 12 million have been forcibly displaced. Rape, kidnapping and famine are rampant. The bloodshed is so extreme that it is visible from space.

Yet nothing like the Save Darfur Coalition has been reconstituted on the activist front — neither by the mainstream Jewish groups who mobilized for the cause two decades ago, nor the progressive left that activated so strongly over what they deemed a genocide in Gaza, during the war that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

“At this time, and simply for capacity reasons, we are not actively engaged in efforts around the ongoing tragedy in Darfur,” Barbara Weinstein, associate director of the Religious Action Center at the Union for Reform Judaism, told JTA.

“The Jewish community has legitimately had several dramatic issues that have raised attention and concern, and often caused crisis, in the last three years, particularly Oct. 7 and rising antisemitism,” Ruth Messinger, the longtime head of American Jewish World Service and former New York City mayoral candidate who co-founded the Save Darfur Coalition, told JTA.

Messinger continued, “Those issues have appropriately concerned the Jewish communities around the world, and so concerned the Jewish communities that it’s been hard to create space for other concerns.”

It’s a conclusion that would have been foreign to Messinger two decades ago. Back then, she was at the forefront of a movement to take the lessons of the Holocaust, still relatively fresh, and apply them to a contemporary crisis.

She and others were haunted by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which occurred over just 100 days when the country’s Hutu government led an attempted purge of its Tutsi ethnic minority. An estimated 1 million Tutsis were massacred, and the speed and scale of the killings — many of which took place in churches, or in open fields in broad daylight — shocked the global consciousness.

Later, President Bill Clinton said he would have taken stronger action against genocide in Rwanda if he had known more at the time. Messinger and other Jewish leaders — those who had embraced the Never Again ethos 50 years after the term genocide was coined in the wake of the Holocaust — took that as a charge.

“There were a lot of people in the Jewish community who felt like we had missed the boat on Rwanda,” Messinger recalled. “We considered ourselves watchdogs for the potential next genocide.”

When, a few short years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof started writing regularly about the crisis in Darfur, Messinger and others — a group including Rabbi Steve Gutow, diplomat Samantha Power and the Holocaust survivor and Nobelist Elie Wiesel— paid attention. In a meeting organized by American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wiesel directly implored Jewish leaders to do something.

“I will never forget that meeting as Wiesel addressed us in his soft-spoken, yet powerful, voice,” recalled Rabbi Marla Feldman, director emeritus of Women of Reform Judaism, who worked on social justice issues with the Reform Action Center at the time. “He looked directly at each of us gathered around, impressing upon us our personal responsibility to take action. No one could say no to his charge to organize that day.”

They decided to throw everything they had into mobilizing on Darfur. The coalition was born.

“Everyone who came to the meeting said, ‘Well, let’s continue working together, and we’ll call ourselves the Save Darfur Coalition,’” recalled Jerry Fowler, now a law professor at the University of Wyoming. At the time Fowler was the (non-Jewish) director for the Committee on Conscience — a division at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum committed to applying the lessons of the Holocaust toward preventing future genocides.

The museum, and more specifically the Committee on Conscience, played a significant role in elevating the crisis in Darfur within the Jewish community by issuing a rare warning that the region was at risk of tipping into genocide. When, in 2004, the U.S. government declared that the Sudanese government and its related militia groups, including the Janjaweed, were indeed committing genocide in Darfur, citing the United Nations Genocide Convention, the combined effect was to put Darfur on the map as a Jewish issue.

“Social justice is a huge component of the way American Jewry expresses their Jewish identity,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center. He was an active figure in both the Save Darfur Coalition and an earlier movement to push for a peace accord to end the Second Sudanese Civil War.

Quickly, Saperstein recalled, “Save Darfur” signs made their way into synagogues across the country.

“Many people put Darfur into their Passover Seders,” he said. “That helped deepen the connection [to] people forced to flee out of oppression and persecution, and what it was like to live in the desert, in a place not your home, with the hope of finding safety and security.” American Jewish World Service encouraged such identification by distributing Darfur-specific seder material.

Back then, Darfur crossed Jewish denominational boundaries. Everyone from the Union for Reform Judaism’s advocacy arm to the Conservative summer camp Camp Ramah to Yeshiva University engaged on the issue. Synagogues jumped onboard “Nothing But Net,” a UN-led initiative to raise funds to send malaria nets to refugee camps — and raised enough on their own to fully stock several camps. Young observant Jews would go on to intern with Darfur policy groups and bring their activism to the upper levers of power.

“I have this vivid memory of sitting in the Beit Knesset at camp listening to a Jewish World Watch staffer talk about the Janjaweed and show photos of devastated villages,” Ami Fields-Meyer, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former White House policy advisor under former President Joe Biden, recalled about his time at Camp Ramah. “It was shocking. It was almost certainly my first exposure to human rights work.”

Adam Zuckerman was a 17-year-old high school student in Maine when Messinger came to his Portland synagogue to speak about Darfur. He was immediately engaged on the issue, making close friends with members of the state’s large Sudanese refugee community and riding buses to D.C. with them.

“I think a lot of it was that, with the legacy of the Holocaust, we had a responsibility to make sure that it never happened again to anyone,” Zuckerman recalled, about the pitch to Jews for getting involved in Darfur. “That was a sort of driving force in why I took on anti-genocide work.”

His friends in the refugee community included El-Fadel Arbab, a genocide survivor who spent nine years trying to enter the United States before finally being granted passage in 2004. Upon his arrival in Maine, Arbab was embraced by local Jewish groups. He would go on to tell his harrowing story, involving fleeing his village and living on the street as a child, at synagogues and Holocaust museums in the state and beyond.

Arbab quickly felt a kinship with his Jewish allies and supporters, rooted in shared trauma: what Darfur villagers suffered at the hands of the Sudanese groups had morbid similarities with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

“What they went through is also remarkable,” he told JTA. “So many Jewish people have been killed. Millions and millions have been killed. They’ve been tortured, they’ve been burned alive. And this is not right.”

Besides the brutality, the Jewish comparison also inspired Arbab — particularly the refrain “Never again,” which he often repeats himself. “They’re still fighting for justice. They’re saying, ‘These victims will learn from the history.’”

A list of the biggest voices within Save Darfur included some of the most prominent Jews in America at the time.

Speakers at the National Mall rally included Messinger; Saperstein; National Jewish Democratic Council director Steve Gutow; Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, before he became its president; and Rabbi Marc Schneier.

They shared the stage with then-Sen. Barack Obama, months before he announced his presidential bid; the top Democrat in Congress, Nancy Pelosi; actor George Clooney; and a range of Sudanese and interfaith activists. “I don’t think there have been many rallies like it in recent years,” Feldman said.

But perhaps the most noteworthy person to grace the stage was Wiesel, who had vocally lobbied not only on behalf of Rwanda but also over the plight of Soviet Jews. It was Wiesel who had inaugurated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience in the first place, to, in the words of the committee’s mandate, “alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity.”

Only a few months earlier, in January 2006, “Night,” Wiesel’s memoir of the concentration camps, was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection 50 years after its original publication. Though already a bestseller, the Oprah exposure introduced “Night” to a new generation of readers and reinforced Wiesel as a global authority on humanitarian crises.

He threw all of that leverage behind Darfur.

“I, as a Jew, am here because when we needed people to come to help us, nobody came. Therefore, we are here,” Wiesel told the National Mall crowd. “I am here as a member of the human family, and we believe that we sinned with Rwanda. We could have saved 6-800,000 men, women and children in Rwanda, and we did not, and the world should be ashamed for that.”

Over applause, he continued, “We are here because in Darfur, families are being uprooted, starved; children tormented and slaughtered in the thousands; and in the eyes of the victims, the world remains indifferent to their plight. We are here because we refuse to be silent. Remember, silence helps the killer, never his victims.”

It was a galvanizing moment, an explicit bridging from the Jewish communal trauma of the Holocaust to the modern-day tragedy in a far-off corner of the world with no obvious Jewish connection. To Wiesel, it just made sense.

“For my father, there was no split between doing what was right on the global stage and standing up for the Jewish community,” Elisha Wiesel, Elie Wiesel’s son, told JTA. “It wasn’t like those were two completely separate projects. My father felt that to be a good Jew meant to stand up and do the right thing on a global scale.”

And there was a divestment push within the Jewish community. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, under pressure from its members, divested its holdings from companies that did business with the Sudanese government, as a means of economically hurting al-Bashir’s regime. In so doing, it joined dozens of similar actions from the country’s leading universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and MIT, all celebrated by the activist group Investors Against Genocide. (A spokesperson for the Reconstructionist movement declined to comment for this story.)

Sustained Jewish activism around Darfur continued for years. In 2009, Jewish leaders were arrested for staging a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy in protest of al-Bashir’s expulsion of more than a dozen aid groups from Darfur. The rabbis were joined at the protest by Democrats including civil rights leader John Lewis. Several Jewish leaders also signed a Save Darfur Coalition letter urging Obama — then president — to resume humanitarian aid in Sudan.

The following year, a delegation of Jewish leaders — including Messinger, Saperstein and Jacobs — traveled to visit a camp for Darfur refugees just over the border in Chad. The trip happened to coincide with the holiday of Sukkot, which, like the Passover Seders before it, drove home the Jewish resonance of the cause.

“To see people living out in the open and eating out in the open,” Saperstein said, “had a particular resonance for us.”

As the years passed, the focus and methods of the Save Darfur Coalition attracted scrutiny and criticism from some corners. “Darfur Wasn’t Saved,” Slate declared in 2017 in a postmortem; groups like Genocide Watch have reached similar conclusions.

Critics dinged the movement for proposing the wrong policy solutions; for infighting among leadership; and for failing to steer more of its own financial resources toward direct aid, among other issues. Some, as early as 2006, were already accusing the movement and its Jewish leaders of using Darfur to ignore Israeli conduct in Gaza — which had just elected Hamas to power earlier that year.

One of the foremost critics of the Save Darfur movement was Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Columbia University professor, prominent critic of Israel and father of New York City’s mayor-elect.

In his 2009 book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, Mamdani argued that Darfur did not constitute a genocide; that those who applied the label may have been operating from a prejudiced perspective against Islam; that activists like those in the coalition didn’t have the proper context for the situation; and that Western intervention may have made the conflict worse. In promoting the book, Mamdani also didn’t mince words in criticizing the Save Darfur Coalition.

“Save Darfur is telling its supporters that the lesson of Rwanda is that there’s no point in talking about causes of conflicts,” Mamdani said on WNYC’s “The Takeaway” in April 2009.

Strains of dissent could also be heard from within the Jewish world, where some argued against what they saw as a conflation of Jewish and progressive values. “Health care, labor unions, public-school education, feminism, abortion rights, gay marriage, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, Darfur: on everything Judaism has a position — and, wondrously, this position just happens to coincide with that of the American liberal Left,” the Israeli writer Hillel Halkin complained in the conservative Jewish magazine Commentary in 2008.

But the Darfur coalition transcended typical ideological divides, including a wide array of Jewish groups as well as fundamentalist Christians and figures motivated by anti-Islam animus. The combination could be awkward. A series of rapid leadership changes, accusations of financial mismanagement and other infighting through the late 2000s led to the group’s ultimate collapse as a viable political force. Jewish communal leaders who spoke to JTA acknowledged that the coalition’s momentum couldn’t be sustained, but they believed that it had a lasting effect, particularly on Jewish communal organizing.

Zuckerman went on to become a close disciple of Messinger at the American Jewish World Service. Today he works for Public Citizen, a progressive group, on environmental issues.

He credits his Darfur activism with his trajectory, as well as for something else: his pro-Palestinian activism, which he has expressed through work in IfNotNow as well as with Jewish Action Maine, a group affiliated with the local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter.

“It’s been tricky, because I don’t feel like I necessarily fit into a box on it, and I am uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric and some of the slogans in these spaces,” Zuckerman said.

At the same time, he said, “I think it would be hypocritical for me to speak out about Darfur and not say anything when people who share my religion are also committing atrocities.”

Israel itself got involved in the initial round of Darfur activism, allowing hundreds of refugees from the region to apply for asylum there. (Upon arrival some of the refugees visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum.) Most of those asylum cases, which were handled by HIAS and did not involve Jews, took years to work their way through Israeli courts before a judge granted the Sudanese asylum seekers temporary status last year.

Today much of the same Jewish institutional muscle that once advocated for Darfur has turned inward, toward fighting antisemitism and shoring up Jewish support for Israel since Oct. 7. That has included fending off accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Over the last two years, Jews have at times disputed statistics and declarations about the state of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis — including allegations that Israel, like Sudan before it, has deliberately withheld humanitarian aid from a conflict zone — that come from the United Nations and various NGOs they had previously worked together with on Darfur causes. Jewish leaders, including at the RAC, have objected to resolutions to boycott or divest from Israel, usually on the grounds that such measures are divisive and unhelpful or can lead to antisemitism.

This has saddened some of the more progressive Jews who saw, in the Darfur fight, a commitment to a kind of universalism of Jewish values they now believe has atrophied.

“I don’t think our voice would have the same weight or the same legitimacy that it has now to speak out on Darfur, because we’ve been so silent, and in many cases so oppositional, to what’s been happening in Gaza,” Zuckerman said. “I think that when we are silent about something that people who share our religion are perpetrating, the world would look at us sort of sideways to be speaking out about [Darfur]. I think it would be seen as trying to distract from other crimes against humanity that are happening in another part of the world.”

Others worry that the fight over whether or when to declare a genocide is blinding people, including Jews, from focusing on what’s really important.

“The term ‘genocide’ is being used in different ways today than in the past, and that’s itself a challenge,” Feldman said. “You could get caught up in the wordsmithing of it — call it genocide, don’t call it genocide. There are atrocities and tragedies taking place around the world, and that speaks to us, and that has a claim on us.”

Meanwhile, with some exceptions, the global pro-Palestinian movement has also been relatively quiet on Darfur — further lending itself to criticisms that a purported principled stance against genocide didn’t extend further than Israel. Many Jews in a post-Oct. 7 climate have noted a fraying of the kinds of interfaith, intercultural alliances that once helped bolster the Save Darfur Coalition.

Jews who spoke to JTA for this article had mixed feelings on this shift. But some were quick to point out that they don’t see Darfur and Gaza as comparable.

“It’s not a parallel thing because you didn’t have an Oct. 7 in Darfur,” Saperstein said. “You didn’t have the people of Darfur attack the population centers where the Janjaweed were. This is just civilians caught in the middle of a horrible, horrible attack from the north and from the Janjaweed militias.”

Elisha Wiesel, like his father a staunch supporter of Israel, also believes Jews’ relative silence on Darfur in the wake of Gaza is a problem. In part, he said, he feared that Jews were allowing terms like “genocide” to become diluted by pro-Palestinian activists.

“I think we have to restore language to its proper use, and we have to call it as we see it,” he said, noting that the Wiesel family foundation has taken on the cause of the persecuted Uyghur minority in China. Similarly, the best way to assert Jewish credibility on the world stage, he argued, would be for Jews to advocate both for Israel and for global humanitarian concerns like Darfur.

“Since Oct. 7 we’ve been reeling, as an American Jewish community, with our own tragedy. And worse, we’ve been having to be on the back foot as accusations of genocide have been flung at Israel,” Wiesel said. “I feel now is the right time to reengage. I think the best way forward is to tackle real genocides.”

Arbab, the Darfur genocide survivor, also disagrees with the genocide label being applied to Gaza. He described feeling an immense empathy for Jews and Israelis after Oct. 7, noting that the brutal nature of the Hamas killings at the Nova music festival mirrored the nature of how the RSF and other Sudanese militias have targeted innocents.

“These monsters, they jumped on people partying, and they’re butchering everybody,” he said. “Israelis want to protect their people and their land, and they come and attack them.”

Arbab continued, “If you’ve been through this struggle, you definitely will say, ‘I stand with Israel.’ If you did not go through these horrible things, you might go to the other side, you might say, ‘Oh, I will support the Palestinians.’ But that is not the case to me. If I have the power, I will protect my people. And anybody who comes to my people, I’m not going to leave them alone.”

Times have changed, some of Save Darfur’s Jewish leaders said. Even setting aside Gaza, the sheer scope and scale of the world’s challenges today means that pushing Jews to mobilize around something like Darfur has become much harder.

“We can’t fight every crisis everywhere,” Feldman, now retired, told JTA. “The current leaders have to be strategic, and the population, to a certain extent, is also going to speak with their feet in terms of what’s compelling them today.”

For more progressive Jews who cut their activist teeth on Darfur, the relative inaction — not just from Jewish communities, but more globally as well — especially stings.

“Darfur was in every Jewish space. And it felt like everyone had a green ‘do not stand idly by’ wristband,” Fields-Meyer recalled. “The unmistakable message was that our moral obligations as Jews bound us to people for no other reason other than that they are human. And a lot of us took that to heart. I certainly did.”

He continued, “Being consistent about those Jewish commitments means doing what’s necessary for families being torn apart by masked agents in Los Angeles, and for children under bombardment in Gaza, and for people under threat in Darfur, and for fellow Jews who are attacked for their identity. It means that there is no hierarchy of human dignity. We’re all worthy.”

Today, the forces that are engaged on Darfur are trying to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates, currently Sudan’s largest arms dealer. President Donald Trump also signaled an interest in ending the conflict and dispatched Massad Boulos — a Lebanese-American businessman and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, who has also proposed a roadmap to Israeli-Palestinian peace — to try to negotiate a ceasefire.

But recent failed ceasefire efforts have led the United States to consider wider sanctions on Sudan. On Dec. 9, the Treasury Department seemed to follow through, sanctioning entities associated with a Colombian group that, the United States said, was funneling mercenaries to Darfur.

Some remain optimistic that American Jewish leadership could reactivate on Darfur today — and believe that it would be the right thing to do.

“I’m hopeful that there will be really positive energy for Darfur,” said Gottschalk, the HIAS staffer. He noted that HIAS, which operates a refugee camp in neighboring Chad, has remained active since the last conflict and is engaged again on Darfur today — in part thanks to the legacy of the coalition. “We haven’t left. It’s been more than 20 years. It’s an expression of the Jewish community’s solidarity.”

He continued, “When we’re working with people in Chad, we are absolutely the first and probably the only Jewish organization they’ve ever met or ever encountered with. We are representing our values and reflecting something really positive with the community.”

Today, Arbab still has family in Darfur under grave danger, though he was able to evacuate his wife and sons out of the region last year. He knows it’s harder now to get the international community to pay attention. He’s still speaking to some Jewish groups, though not as many as before.

The Sudanese government, he believes, fears the accountability that would come with the genocide label being applied once more to Darfur. He hopes the global community will activate again — and this time try to break the cycle of killing for good.

“The Jewish people, they went through their genocide a long time ago,” he said. “But the genocide now is the same, and even worse. These criminals, always, they’re thinking of new tactics and new ways to do more genocide, how to harm people. We have to stop that. Especially those who have felt the pain of the victims, they have to stand up.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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