Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on a virtual reality documentary about Auschwitz that was created by Haredi filmmakers and feature an op-ed from Kate Warach. We’ll start with a new pilot program from the Orthodox Union, sending college students to Rwanda.
When Matan Schwartz decided to spend his summer break on a relief mission half a world away from his East Coast home, he felt it important to help a broad community rather than pigeonhole himself into only helping fellow Jews, he told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.
Schwartz, 19, an incoming freshman at Brandeis University from Philadelphia, spent a week in June with over 500 teens at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), a Rwandan orphanage in Colline Nawe, 37 miles from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. ASYV is modeled after Yemin Orde, an Israeli youth village established in 1953 to care for orphans of the Holocaust.
The mission was run by the Orthodox Union – the first such mission organized by the organization – and it brought seven undergraduate and graduate students to Rwanda. Students paid $1,000 plus airfare to participate. They slept at the village and engaged with residents over various art, music and sports activities.
While non-Orthodox groups have for decades organized humanitarian missions to developing nations and locations hit by natural disasters, often citing the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, Orthodox institutions have been slower to follow suit.
According to Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, Orthodox groups started getting involved in 2007 when he founded Uri L’Tzedek, an Orthodox social justice group that runs service trips specifically to help non-Jewish populations.
The OU’s Relief Missions director, Rabbi Ethan Katz, who led the group of American students to Rwanda, has coordinated all of the NCSY missions since they started as a response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “We came across the village of Rwanda as a way to attract and motivate smart kids who care about social justice and want to get involved,” he said. “It quickly evolved to kids of all walks of life; religious and non-religious. The program we do in Rwanda is really about making future leaders in Rwanda, helping them come out of the village and get started in businesses while also engaging our Jewish students in a meaningful way.”
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