Tzohar Orlando – Helping Save the World
JANUARY 2008 -- Conservative Judaism always has taken seriously our mandate to help to improve the world. We know that social justice work is one of the three pillars that support the world, neither more nor less important than prayer and study.
We stressed the importance of working to help repair the world our recent international biennial convention in Orlando; there were social action programs presented throughout the four days.
Perhaps the most far-reaching of the projects was Tzohar Orlando, the latest in a series of United Synagogue programs. A tzohar is a window, like the window in the ark that allowed Noah to look out and eventually to see light. We have brought some light to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in Tzohar Biloxi, so the convention seemed a perfect opportunity to make a small difference in the world, and, perhaps even more strongly, to learn more about worlds outside our own. Hence Tzohar Orlando, a pilot for similar projects and other conventions.
On Wednesday morning, a group of seven delegates went to Give Kids the World, a program for terminally ill children and their families, and another nine met with migrant workers in the Gleaning Project.
The Gleaning Project is a program the Catholic Farmworkers Ministry in Apopka, Florida, runs for migrant workers. Tzohar Orlando participants worked with them in the morning and talked with them in the afternoon. It was eye-opening.
“I did it because I thought it would be really exciting to begin the convention doing something that is not directed toward me but is something bigger than me, and this looked like it would be very challenging,” said Rosalind Judd, who lives in Albany, New York, and is on United Synagogue’s executive council. “And it was phenomenal. I learned about an area that I really had known very little about, the condition of migrant workers.”
In the morning, participants gleaned cucumbers. “This was the biggest field of cucumbers I’d ever seen,” said Ms. Judd, who admittedly has not seen many such fields. And the project was true gleaning – “the farmer had completed his first harvest and he turned over whatever remains in the fields to the sisters of St. Andrew, who arrange for the gleaning. The cucumbers that are left in the field are too big, too small, or too curly to be used commercially. They hand you fifty-pound sacks, and you fill them up. We each picked about four 50-pound bags; they go to food pantries and soup kitchens.”
Cucumbers also ooze white goo that can ruin an unwary picker’s clothing, Ms. Judd, an unwary picker, learned.
In the afternoon, the group met with high school students, the children of migrant workers. “I met a lot of people, particularly young teenagers, bright, well-spoken, with lots of promise and dreams and very little chance of achieving those dreams,” Ms. Judd said. “They want to go to college. Two of them had 4.0 averages, one wants to be a dentist, one wants to be an engineer. Realistically, they probably can’t go to college; and the alternative is picking cucumbers or washing cars or working in a nursery, and it’s all illegal. It was heartbreaking.”
Give Kids the World is a program that each year gives about 6,000 terminally ill children and their families a wonderfully plush place to stay while they visit Orlando’s many theme parks. Give Kids the World is staffed by social workers and therapists; volunteers work behind the scenes. The United Synagogue group power-washed the building where families stay, according the Richard Skolnik of Bellmore, New York, United Synagogue’s vice president for community relations.
“We met the kids, but at orientation we were told not to interact with them,” Mr. Skolnik said. “You can smile at them, but you have to stay in the background, because we’re not professionals and don’t know what to say. There are thousands of volunteers every year, and we all stay in the background.
“The concept is that a child with a life-threatening illness comes with his or her family and stays in a villa for five or six days. They get free tickets to Disney attractions and other places, and then they have their own programs. Every Thursday they celebrate Christmas,” because it is by no means certain that the children will be alive in December.
“The program was started by a man named Henri Landwirth, who is a true mitzvah hero,” Mr. Skolnik said. “He’s a Holocaust survivor; he was 16 when the war was over and now, at 80, he’s able to give these children this gift.”
“It was not a glamorous job, it was down and dirty work. And it was a wonderful experience to volunteer there, to be able to do something in a place that helps put some joy in kids’ lives.”
