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This Jewish non-profit in Brooklyn helps refugees furnish their new homes
(New York Jewish Week) – When S., a Pakistani refugee, finally moved to a stable living situation in New York City, there was still one thing missing: furniture.
S. had left Pakistan for New York hoping to provide a better, healthier life for her younger brother R., who has Down syndrome. After a year of moving around the city, applying for asylum and trying to get on her feet, S. — who asked that her name not be used while the rest of her family waits for their asylum cases to be approved — found a room in a semi-basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens in March 2022.
But even though they had a roof over their heads, S., 44, and R. hardly had any household items to their names. Instead of beds, for example, they slept on a shared rug on the floor.
Enter Ruth’s Refuge. The Brooklyn-based Jewish non-profit aims to provide New York’s refugee community with items needed to help jumpstart their new lives and fill their homes. The organization helped S. and R. secure many household essentials both large and small, from mugs to furniture.
“It’s one thing if you’re going to drop something on a doorstep; it’s another to bring every single thing into my house and help me set it up,” S. told the New York Jewish Week about the assistance she got from Ruth’s Refuge. “We cannot do much because it’s only me and R. But they did everything — every single thing. To be very honest, I’m really blessed.”
Ruth’s Refuge emerged from a task force at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope that started in 2016 as a response to an influx of refugees fleeing Syria. Since then, they’ve expanded to a team of 120 volunteers and three full-time staff dedicated to meeting the needs of the thousands of refugees arriving in New York — first from Syria, then from Afghanistan, South and Central America and Ukraine. Last year, Ruth’s Refuge furnished over 100 households, providing more than $150,000 worth of furnishings and home goods, mostly accumulated from individual donations.
“I grew up embedded in the Jewish community and very much raised with the concept of ‘never again,’” said Leah Cover, the organization’s founder and executive director. “I always viewed that in a very universal way, that ‘never again’ meant for anybody, not just the Jewish people.”
“The idea that you would have this kind of thing repeating itself when we built the refugee system in response to the Holocaust, primarily, and then to have it just completely break down when it was most needed again was just really horrifying to watch,” she added.
Ruth’s Refuge joins a cadre of other Jewish-aligned organizations that endeavor to create softer landings for refugees in New York. Among them are Masbia, which has been meeting arriving migrants at Port Authority Bus Terminal with shoes, clothing and food, and New Neighbors Partnership, which matches incoming refugee families with small children with a New York-based family to receive clothing, toys and advice. HIAS, one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies in the country, was founded in New York City in 1902 to aid incoming Jewish refugees fleeing persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe.
Cover said watching the worldwide response to the Syrian refugee crisis animated her to start the refugee task force at the Reform synagogue and eventually found Ruth’s Refuge — named for the biblical figure Ruth, who was welcomed as a stranger and integrated into the community. “One of the very heartening things in starting the refugee task force was just seeing how much the Jewish community wanted to be involved in a response to this and making sure that we lived our values,” she said.
At first, Cover and other volunteers fielded a lot of “ad hoc requests,” she said. Over time, resettlement agencies began to rely upon her team more and more, especially to help with apartment setups — including managing donations of homegoods, renting U-Hauls to transport them and assisting with building furniture.
Ruth’s Refuge became its own independent 501(c)(3) organization in the spring of 2019. These days, they work with a number of resettlement agencies, primarily HIAS, Catholic Charities, International Rescue Committee and Queer Detainee Empowerment Project.
Once asylum seekers have secured permanent housing, Ruth’s Refuge will assign each family a volunteer who acts as a personal shopper. Generally there is no limit to the amount of furniture a family can pick out — as long as it fits in their home, although for certain items like dish sets and TVs, Ruth’s Refuge can usually only provide one per family, Cover said.
The items, housed in storage units in Gowanus, are then packed up and delivered all over the city by teams of volunteers.
Kathy Fenelly, a retired professor of public policy and immigration policy, is one such volunteer. “I’ve worked on advising immigrants on immigration policy for a number of years,” she said. “But this is the first [organization] I’ve ever seen that has such a focused and specific mission to work with immigrants and refugees in order to be sure that they have the basics that they need in their apartments.”
Fenelly has been a part of the organization since it was founded at CBE, and said its mission strongly reflects the Jewish value of welcoming the stranger. “Everyday, I get to say, ‘Welcome to New York. I’m really happy that you’re here,’” she said.
As for S., Ruth’s Refuge helped her and R. secure a hair dryer, soap, towels and a table. Their modest room wasn’t big enough for two beds, so a bunk bed was ordered on Amazon and volunteers helped build the furniture when it arrived.
A group of volunteers from Ruth’s Refuge smile in front of a U-Haul van hired to bring furniture and household goods to a refugee family. (Courtesy Ruth’s Refuge)
S. had left Pakistan in February 2021 with R. with the intent to visit Chicago, where her father had relatives, and then New York, which she had visited before. She had planned to stay a few weeks; traveling with her brother, she assumed it would be a harrowing journey — in Pakistan, she said, her brother’s Down syndrome was often met with contempt, anger and confusion.
Here in the United States, however, S. was surprised by the degree of acceptance, warmth and respect shown to her brother. That’s why she came to believe immigration was necessary: As S. told the New York Jewish Week, she felt her and her brother’s lives were at stake, so she applied for asylum in April 2021.
S. learned their asylum applications were approved at the end of October 2022. Catholic Charities then helped S. and R. get IDs, Social Security numbers and health care, and also provided a few hundred dollars a month to help them get on her feet.
These days, S. works as a home health aide. “It’s becoming home,” she said. “It’s surprising because I was raised in Pakistan, but I never felt like this in my country.”
Left behind in Pakistan are her husband, two other brothers and her 21-year-old son. But her son’s asylum application was approved last month, she said, and she thinks her husband’s will be soon as well, so she’s optimistic they’ll be able to join her in New York later this year.
“I buy things [now] because I can save the money for it,” S. said. “But the first step was Catholic Charities and the second step was Ruth’s Refuge.”
“I’m very, very satisfied in the United States,” she added. “I’m very blessed.”
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The post This Jewish non-profit in Brooklyn helps refugees furnish their new homes appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of America’s modern women’s movement, died Wednesday at her New York City home. She was 92.
For more than half a century, Steinem pushed American women to imagine lives beyond the limits society had set for them. She co-founded Ms. magazine, helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turned phrases like “sexual harassment” from unnamed experiences into subjects of national debate.
Steinem was the daughter of a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She was raised without much religion and generally described herself as secular, but she was unequivocal about where she stood when Jews were targeted: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
Her mother taught her to value her Jewish roots. Steinem told the Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage; it was her non-Jewish mother who presented Judaism to her as something positive — “She also told me Jewish men made better husbands” — and taught her about her paternal grandmother.
That grandmother was a feminist pioneer in her own right. Pauline Steinem, who kept kosher, was an educator, suffragist, delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women and the first woman elected to Toledo’s school board — and during the Nazi’s rise in the mid-1930s, she worked to rescue members of her family from Europe.
A feminist Seder became her strongest connection to Jewish ritual. Steinem participated for decades in an annual women’s Seder, calling it the first spiritually centered experience of her feminist life. What drew her to Judaism, she said, wasn’t the law — it was “the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the Shechinah.
She recognized how antisemitism and misogyny fed each other. In her memoir, Steinem recalled a cabdriver telling her that feminism was a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family. Her response to such hatred was not to distance herself from Jews, but to identify with them more strongly.
That identification outlasted her. Gloria and her sister, Susanne, donated a catalog of jewelry seized from Nazi victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — in honor of their grandmother.
Steinem continued writing and advocating for equality into her 90s. Her final book, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to publish later this month.
The post When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most appeared first on The Forward.
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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.
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How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust
How did the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research find a new home in the United States after the Holocaust? Kalman Weiser (York University, Toronto) narrates this dramatic story in a new book, Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America.
Initially, YIVO’s success wasn’t a sure thing. It was “hardly clear to YIVO’s staff and supporters in the 1940s that an organization dedicated to serving the intellectual and cultural needs of a global, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could take root in the radically different circumstances of postwar America,” Weiser writes.
Before the war, YIVO already had an American branch in New York but its main goal was raising money for the institute in Vilna. Several YIVO activists also focused on researching Yiddish culture and history — but again, mainly in Eastern Europe.
The truth was, most American Jews had little interest in Yiddish and didn’t think highly of Jewish studies at all.
After the Holocaust, YIVO stood at a crossroads: It could either become an archive dedicated to Yiddish life destroyed in Eastern Europe, or it could further develop Yiddish scholarship to give Yiddish a new lease on life in America.
Weiser guides the reader through the fierce debates among YIVO’s associates over the direction the institute should take. Yudel Mark maintained that YIVO should focus primarily on Holocaust research, while former Bundists argued that it should study the conditions of the Jewish masses in America.
Max Weinreich, YIVO’s intellectual godfather, had an altogether different vision. He believed that American Jewry could actually play the leading role in the Jewish world after the Holocaust. At the same time, though, he didn’t think they were ready to assume this responsibility. They needed the Yiddish-speaking refugees and immigrants, such as himself and other East European intellectuals, to guide them.
According to Weinreich, YIVO should concern itself not only with visnshaft (scholarship), but with visn vos shaft (“knowledge that creates”). In other words, Yiddish scholarship needed to enable American Jews to preserve their Jewishness and secure the continuity of Yiddish.
The success of this monumental undertaking depended on the Yiddish language itself. Yiddish needed to serve as a bridge between generations of Jews, a spiritual and intellectual connection between the old country and the new.
For this reason, Weinreich held that the American Jewish intellectual leaders needed to be “de-assimilated,” and the prestige of Yiddish needed to be raised in American academia.
But despite Weinreich’s efforts, YIVO remained on the margins of the Jewish mainstream and received limited support from major Jewish philanthropic organizations. Relations between YIVO and the American Yiddish literati were also strained.
The normative, standard Yiddish that YIVO wanted to promote drew criticism from some American Yiddish writers and journalists. They argued that “YIVO Yiddish” differed considerably from the authentic, natural Yiddish they were raised with.
In his articles in the Forward, Isaac Bashevis Singer ridiculed neologisms as kadmen-yidish (proto-Yiddish) and breyshes-yidish (old Yiddish), linguistic concepts that Weinreich had invented to describe different historical phases in the development of the Yiddish language.
At the heart of the conflict between YIVO and Yiddish writers, Weiser explains, was the question: “To whom does Yiddish belong?” YIVO’s goal was to create a normative language that could be taught like other foreign languages. In this way, the future of Yiddish could be secured even if a living community of Yiddish speakers no longer existed.
The tensest chapters in YIVO’s history revolved around the struggle to recover the materials that formerly belonged to the institute in Vilna.
The Nazis sent some of the books and documents to Germany for the archives of the museum the Nazis were planning, “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question.” After the war these materials fell into the hands of the American military administration in Germany.
Recovering these materials was an incredible feat on the part of Weinreich and his colleagues, among them Lucy Schildkret (better known by her married name, Dawidowicz), who later made her name as a Holocaust scholar. Legally, the American military administration was obligated to return the plundered materials to Poland or the Soviet Union. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a claimant as well.
Weinreich worked his contacts among the American elite, and in 1947, YIVO recovered the archives. He also succeeded in presenting YIVO as the heir to other cultural institutions in Vilna. As a result, YIVO received the collections of the renowned Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society.
The second chapter of YIVO’s history occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. A significant collection of YIVO materials was discovered in Lithuania, thanks to a Lithuanian librarian who had hidden it in the warehouse of the national book chamber.
This time, YIVO had to negotiate with the government of the Lithuanian Republic, which had recently become independent. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and these materials can now be accessed digitally.
Weiser’s history of YIVO is an engaging, well-researched book. Max Weinreich was far from the only European Jewish refugee to find a new home in America and build a successful career there. But he may be the only one who single-handedly rebuilt an important European Jewish scholarly institute that remains active till the present day.
The post How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
