​Most among us are familiar with the adage, “two Jews, three opinions.” The idea squares with the concept of a Jewish intellectual legacy, so called by Rabbi Joshua Waxman, in which we consistently emphasize the value of posing questions, debate and education. But in a time when there are so many internal (and external) threats to Jewish Peoplehood, how do Jewish institutions and leaders begin to harness diversity of opinion as a collective strength? And in this increasingly fractured world, what is our responsibility to foster the safe spaces in which we can begin to challenge the status quo?
 
Enter the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship (NGF), which has successfully modeled communal leadership development by promoting and empowering the very diversity that is so often shunned as a divisive factor. The fellowship is operated by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC), of which B’nai B’rith International sits on the Board of Trustees. Our organization has been actively involved with the MFJC since its very inception. Two former B’nai B’rith International presidents, Philip M. Klutznick Z"L and Jack J. Spitzer Z"L, went on to serve at the helm of the Memorial Foundation, and our organization currently employs five NGF alumni.
 
The NGF itself is a pluralistic leadership development program for young Jewish professionals and lay leaders from across the world. The immersive, week-long program convenes expert faculty and eager participants for exploration of Jewish identity and shared learning with a focus on the future of the Jewish people. According to the MFJC, “the initial goal … was to create a space whereby the Fellows could explore their relation to their own Jewish identity and redefine it based on their own particular Jewish journey. It also aimed to help these individuals redefine their roles as young Jewish leaders.”  In other words, as later articulated, “the development of the social capital of the Jewish people.”
 
This August, I had the great privilege of participating in the 3rd cohort of the NGF Network Leadership Seminar prior to and concurrent with the 30th International NGF held in Hanover, Germany. Invited as an alumna of the 28th International NGF that met in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 2016, I arrived in Germany enthusiastic about the opportunity, once again, to plug into that “Jewish intellectual legacy” and recharge.
 
This year’s fellowship was the first held in Germany. In addition to a packed program on the topic “From Generation to Regeneration — Engaging Memory, Culture and Identity,” participants in this year’s NGF met with German officials and visited the Bergen-Belsen memorial site—both firsts in the program’s history — and visited with the local Jewish community in Hanover, whose partnership was indispensible to the hospitable welcome we felt.
 
This fellowship’s greatest strength lies in the network's diversity, itself a microcosm of Jewish Peoplehood, and each cohort’s willingness to bond in productive discomfort. In this way the NGF endeavors and so powerfully succeeds in transcending denomination, affiliation and politics. Alongside B’nai B’rith Program Officer for U.N. Affairs Oren Drori and fellows from 17 countries, NGF 30 tackled some of the most pressing questions of our time through a lens reflecting the broad scope and depth of values shared across the Jewish world. The result is an unparalleled enthusiasm for Jewish communal engagement and a generation of future leaders better equipped to face tomorrow’s challenges.
 
At first take, NGF was an important thought exercise in my personal Jewish journey.  But upon reflection of the breadth of my NGF experiences, it has evolved into so much more: a vastly important and growing network of mentors and friends all over the world; deep, meaningful and thoughtful scholarly exchange that seek substance and connection; and a highly successful model for leadership development of Jewish professionals and lay leaders.
 
I return from Germany as I did Mexico; once again inspired by the quality of the fellows, the passion they hold for their work within Jewish communities around the globe, and the unmatched devotion of MFJC staff, its Board and NGF faculty to foster this critical global network. 

​Sienna Girgenti is the Assistant Director for the International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy and Director of the Cuban Jewish Relief Project at B'nai B'rith International. To view some of her additional content, click here.

​MASHAV — Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation — this year celebrates 60 years of critical development work in fields ranging from agriculture to health and from community development to entrepreneurship. As a part of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the agency set out with the aim of transferring expertise to developing countries that have assisted Israel on its own path to development. Today, Israel cooperates with over 132 countries providing trainings in Israel and abroad, and operating long-term on-site projects.
 
The guiding principles of MASHAV are directly informed by and intertwined with Jewish value of “tikkun olam.” It provides the foundation for Israel’s commitment to contribute to the fight against poverty and global efforts to achieve sustainable development, and it is reflected in our own mission at B’nai B’rith to dedicate resources to make the world a safer, more tolerant and better place. Fundamentally, we agree that development cooperation can and should be used to forge bonds of peaceful cooperation between Israel, the Jewish community and our neighbors.
 
David Ben-Gurion, the founder and first prime minister of Israel, recognized the importance of development work as both a moral and a political issue for Israel. Even in the early 1950s, shortly after gaining precarious independence, Israel’s leaders knew that their experience was relevant for Africa. Foreign Minister Golda Meir set out with the blessing of Ben-Gurion to establish close relations with emerging African countries and to fortify those relations with material assistance through MASHAV.
 
Though the nascent state of Israel was still very much a developing country itself — dealing with food security, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had been forcibly expelled across the Middle East, water scarcity and a plethora of health and social ills — they understood the value of their expertise for young emerging countries facing similar challenges. Israel was still a growing country but had already so much to offer in the way of knowledge regarding agriculture, water conservation and equality in the labor force.
 
Due to such similar conditions Israel has been, and effectively still is, a laboratory for development solutions, and indeed makes the nation well positioned to support sustainable development worldwide. That Israel is able to serve in this capacity with such a small budget is a remarkable testament to the ingenuity and values of the Jewish state. 
 
What started as a modest program focused on grassroots-level human capacity building — at a time when Israel itself was still very much a developing country — blossomed into an extensive program of cooperation throughout the developing world with the aim of ensuring social, economic and environmental sustainable development.
 
With a presence in countries all around the world, one of the pillars of B’nai B’rith’s own work is helping communities. Our disaster relief program has raised funds to help the victims of disasters around the world since 1865. While not first responders ourselves, we work closely with first responders in answering the call to the world’s most pressing emergent challenges.
 
B’nai B’rith has made its own contribution to Israel-Africa ties by helping to establish and sustain IsraAID — the largest Israeli civil society organization dedicated to providing humanitarian aid around the world. In Africa, we have partnered in response to famine, the Ebola crisis and the Kenyan school massacre.
 
IsraAID was established as a partnership between Israeli and Diaspora Jewish organizations — including B’nai B’rith. In its 17 years, IsraAID has engaged in hundreds of projects in dozens of countries around the world, bringing Israeli professionals and volunteers to assist in solutions to natural and man-made disasters.
 
The impact of these combined development efforts is two-fold, as Ben-Gurion suggested: both in the direct development outcomes, but also in establishing closer ties for Israel and the Jewish people around the world. In the work of B’nai B’rith, the impact of MASHAV is far reaching and often presents in unexpected places. Many of the diplomats that we engage in our advocacy work — based in Washington, D.C., New York at the United Nations and abroad — have participated in a training program by the agency. MASHAV is a pioneer in institutionalizing this type of “aid diplomacy” and we consistently see it reflected in our relations with foreign governments.
 
The return on investment has been immense, and the program continues to be a remarkable success. MASHAV’s signature approach is truly a model for the world.

​Sienna Girgenti is the Assistant Director for the International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy and Director of the Cuban Jewish Relief Project at B'nai B'rith International. To view some of her additional content, Click Here.

We could not have imagined that within just a few shorts weeks the world would endure the devastation of three major hurricanes in the Atlantic basin and multiple earthquakes across the region. These natural disasters have put an immense strain on international humanitarian relief efforts. The B’nai B’rith Disaster Relief Fund has made appeals to support the recovery in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, and continues to monitor the urgent recovery needs in Puerto Rico and other areas facing dire situations. The B’nai B’rith Cuban Jewish Relief project is also closely following the evolving needs of the Jewish community in Cuba, where Hurricane Irma made landfall as a Category 5 storm on Friday, Sept. 8.
 
Hurricane Irma was the first Category 5 storm to make landfall in Cuba since 1932. B’nai B’rith International learned quickly from our partners on the ground that the damage was severe, and the impact devastating. Storm surge pushed about a third of a mile inland into low-lying neighborhoods and adjoining towns, and two of the synagogues in Havana took on water. Immediately, power, gas and water services were affected.
 
Although thousands of people were evacuated, innumerable buildings suffered partial or total damage.  Medicines, foodstuffs and other basic necessities were difficult to locate or afford before Hurricane Irma, and the crisis in these realms continues to worsen, despite a coordinated international humanitarian response. A United Nations report says between 210,000 and 220,000 homes were severely damaged, agricultural crops and livestock hit hard and 14 municipalities from the northern coast of Villa Clara province east to Camagüey critically impacted.

​The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is on the brink of collapse. The tragedy has simmered over decades, culminating in civil unrest, barren shelves, looting, riots and lacking institutions, which have captured headlines for two years. President Nicolas Maduro continues to shift the blame externally for Venezuela’s woes, faulting an axis of foreign companies, the United States and other dark foreign forces.
 
In reality, the challenges stem from a melding of socialism and authoritarianism that has systematically destroyed Venezuela’s capacity across industries. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Venezuelan economy is expected to shrink 8% this year, with inflation rising to a staggering 720%. And the government has dug its heels in. Venezuela has avoided technical assistance from the I.M.F. and other international institutions for economies in crisis. Maduro’s public is fed up.
 
The Venezuelan Institute of Data Analysis found that 68 percent of Venezuelans want Maduro gone. At the beginning of May, the national coalition of opposition parties got the ball rolling on a recall referendum to remove him from power before his term is set to end in 2019. The coalition delivered over 1.85 million signatures, nearly 10 times the number required to launch the recall process.
 
All expect that the referendum may be hard to push through, with the understanding that the National Electoral Council is staffed by loyalists to the Bolivarian revolution. As if that weren’t enough of an obstacle, rolling blackouts have the workweek reduced to two days. The ostensible effort to preserve electricity will strangle the agency’s already stagnated capacity to a slow drip.

Sienna Girgenti is the Assistant Director for the International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy at B'nai B'rith International. To view some of her additional content, Click Here.

"If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” – Hillel

Over the past year, human rights advocates and policy experts alike have warned of the growing plight of refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis triggered in the Middle East. And over the past few weeks, headlines finally began to reflect this desperate reality.

Stories on the human toll of the refugee crisis abound. Laith Majid in tears clutching his two children just off the Greek Island of Kos. Drowned three-year-old Aylan Kurdi on the shores of Turkey. A truckload of more than 70 refugees die of heatstroke in Austria. 

The number of displaced people in the world today is the highest number since World War II at 60 million people. Currently there are four million Syrian refugees who have escaped war and dire living conditions and an additional seven million Syrian citizens currently displaced within their country’s borders. The European Union’s (EU) border agency has said more than half a million migrants have arrived at the EU's borders this year, a massive influx nearly double the number from 2014, with origins ranging throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Iran—which publicly and proudly declares its intent to wipe Israel off the map—has been a major contributor to building the financial and military capacity of Hezbollah. It is directly responsible for developing the infrastructure of terror in Central and South America in order to, among other goals, have a base from which to attack the United States. 

Iran has been clearly implicated in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the AMIA bombing two years later of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people.  Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor charged with investigating the AMIA bombing, was found dead in his home earlier this year after presenting an avalanche of evidence about Iran's terrorist activities throughout the region. Most recently, he accused Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, her foreign minister and other members and allies of the government of having obstructed the investigation of Iranian involvement in the attack in order to secure an oil deal with Iran.

In fact, just a few months ago, an Iranian diplomat based in Uruguay hurriedly left the country after rumors that he was involved in suspicious activities, purportedly involving a plan to bomb the Embassy of Israel in Montevideo. 

Venezuela has proven the linchpin of this Iranian activity, with the country providing passports to members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and with ties including a direct air link, Iranian investments in “auto, bicycle, and cement” factories, and joint petroleum and mining ventures. Reports of military cooperation abound. Iran has steadily infiltrated Latin America in this manner, creating strong and dangerous ties with countries in the Chavez-Castro alliance (the Bolivarian Alternative for our Americas, or ALBA) including Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador, where Iran has signed dozens of economic agreements.

These avenues of influence are described by security analyst Joseph Humire as Iran’s pattern of penetration, evolving through its cultural, diplomatic, economic and military influence. It is clear that Iran maintains Latin America as a strategic priority for its global positioning.

It is in the context of all this manipulation that the United States, as a member of the P5+1, held negotiations and signed a deal with Iran with the intention of curbing its nuclear capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief. The Iran nuclear deal has been evaluated at length, and has been heavily criticized from broad reaches of the political spectrum. 

It is odd, then, that through all the debate and discussion, there still remains the question that everyone has seemingly failed to ask: what will be the impact of the Iran nuclear deal in our own backyard? One has to ask what effect sanctions relief will have on Iranian financial and material assistance to Hezbollah and other regional proxies throughout the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere. 

The economic sanctions that at least strained Iranian endeavors over the past three decades will be lifted.  There is no doubt that the half-trillion dollar jackpot Iran is slated to receive will be directly funneled into those activities we dread most: the exportation of Iranian aggression and anti-Semitism. These funds, returned to the coffers of a known state sponsor of terrorism, will surely make their way toward financial and material assistance to Hezbollah and other regional proxies. As it concerns U.S. national security, one can’t help but flatly reject the far-reaching concessions of the P5+1 as a direct threat to our interests regionally, let alone globally.

The reaction in Latin America has, thus far, been as one might expect.  Kirchner has praised the agreement, while questioning local critics of the AMIA memorandum pact, surely a failed attempted to bless her own deal with Iran in the face of mounting pressure. The president of Colombia also congratulated President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for their “courage” in securing the deal, perhaps related to Colombia’s close relationship with the United States.

But with history as our guide, this agreement will do more harm than good. The expanded presence of Iran in Latin American should have, at the outset, given the United States pause, given a known regime in Tehran that supports terrorism as an officially sanctioned tool of national power. That Iran remains heavily invested in the region’s shift to the left and the anti-U.S. sentiment it provokes is hardly surprising. The fact that regional powers do not recognize the danger within their own borders is naïve at best, ignorant at worst.

While a nuclear Iran would trigger proliferation and instability throughout the Middle East and beyond, the easing of sanctions will be found to provide an umbrella for Iran’s terror proxies around the globe. There has been no accountability for Iran’s decades-long history of deception and denial over their nuclear ambitions and past links to terrorism, and there is no reason to give Iran the benefit of the doubt now.

Beginning with Moorish rule in the 8th century, the Iberian Peninsula became a magnet for world Jewry. The arrival of Jews to modern-day Spain and Portugal ushered in one of the most flourishing periods in Jewish history known as The Golden Age of Spain. The Jews of the region excelled, playing major roles in cultural and political life, and peacefully co-existing with Muslims and Christians for centuries.

That bright and prosperous history took a sharp turn with persecution and riots against the Jews taking hold in the 13th century. The forced conversions and public contempt for the Jews of Spain culminated with the Alhambra Decree of 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella called for the expulsion of all Jewish people. Thus began the dispersal of Jews to nearby North Africa, Italy, the Ottoman Empire and beyond, to the frontier edges of the New World. The exact number of Jews who left Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century is debated by scholars, but estimates suggest several hundred thousand.

Fast forward to the year 2015, where Spanish Jews number in the low tens of thousands—a fraction of the Jewish population in France, Germany or the United Kingdom. Today, Spain is attempting to rectify “the biggest mistake in Spanish history,” according to Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, with new draft legislation which would grant Spanish citizenship to descendants of Jews expelled in 1492. 

The measure was presented to a visiting delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations a little over a year ago in Madrid, attended by B’nai B’rith President Allan J. Jacobs and Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin. “Spanish nationality is a right, not a privilege,” said Ruiz-Gallardón, “The government will have no discretion in conferring citizenship once the law is passed.”

Modern Spain has made other attempts at making amends for a rocky past with its Jewish citizenry. The laws of the Inquisition were reversed with the 1869 constitution, proclaiming religious tolerance, and the Alhambra Decree itself was revoked in 1968. In 1992, in honor of the country’s quincentennial, King Juan Carlos proclaimed Sephardic Jews had a place in Spain, establishing the idea of granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews. But with no framework for implementation, a weak economy, and little political will, the proposal laid dormant. 

The path to citizenship currently being debated would allow Jews outside of the country with ancestral roots in Spain to keep their current citizenship—a progressive move by repatriation standards—but places a burden of proof on a people whose lineage must be traced back over 500 years and often with a trajectory across multiple territories. The measure, which passed Spain’s lower house of Parliament at the end of March, awaits approval by the upper house, and is expected to become law this spring. 

The early response by the Sephardic Diaspora has been enthusiastic, especially in places like the Balkans and in Latin America, and for vulnerable or otherwise isolated communities like those in Cuba. Others have responded more critically, wary that this may be somewhat self serving and an impractical conciliatory move. 

In the traditional sense, Sephardic Jews draw their origins to the Iberian Peninsula—Sefarad is a Hebrew word meaning Spain. Today however the word Sephardim has taken a much wider meaning to include most all Jews who are not Ashkenazim.

Under the current language, applicants must be certified as Sephardic by Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities, and thus traceable to Jews who resided in Spain before the mass expulsions. Then they must be tested, in Spain, by a government-approved notary on their knowledge of Spanish and Sephardic culture. If they pass, applicants would need to return to Spain at a later date, and at their own expense, for another procedure. The logistical standards to repatriation as established by the process alone could deter some candidates.

Estimates of expected applications range widely from 75,000 to over 150,000, though all may not qualify. The question remains whether or not Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities has the capacity to manage their newfound qualifying authority.

There are many practical challenges to unrolling and implementing this new legislation. Still, the uncertainty that surrounds the bill has done little to tamper expectations among the Sephardic Diaspora. For B’nai B’rith’s part, we remain cautiously optimistic that this important and sincere gesture of goodwill by the Spanish government creates an opportunity for Spain to compel the return of the Ladino language and its unique heritage, as well as the Sephardic culture to the land of its origin.