I mentioned in my last piece on the “mega-crisis” rocking the Congo that sources familiar with the situation on the ground in North Kivu’s Beni area believe that ethnic cleansing, i.e., forced deportation, of the Nande people is underway. Since late 2014, nearly 1,000 civilians have been murdered, and hundreds of thousands have fled their…
Jewish World Watch (JWW) supports multiple programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including educational initiatives, mass information campaigns around gender-based violence, peace and leadership trainings, and skills development to help war-affected communities move from mere surviving to thriving. At one point, when the situation on the ground remained relatively calm, JWW internally…
UPDATE — Nov. 7, 2018: The student captives have been released after being held hostage for about two days. More than 70 students were dropped off at the campus of their Presbyterian Secondary School in Nkwen, from where they had been abducted two nights prior. Despite the posting of a video in which a group…
“I feel my friend’s pain and my pain. I don’t feel anything else.” These are the words of 12 year Yemeni boy Khaled, one of the few survivors of the Aug. 9 bombing of a school bus taking school children to a picnic. Yemen is one of the most dangerous places in the world to…
By now, most Americans have heard about the massacre of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh this past Saturday. Jewish World Watch (JWW) was created to monitor and call attention to mass atrocities and genocides worldwide. When most of our work is focused on countries in the Global South or areas…
We are all connected, and our hearts are broken. As the tragic news poured out of Pittsburgh on Saturday morning, many Jews in Los Angeles spoke of their own close ties to the Tree of Life Synagogue, where 11 people were murdered during a Shabbat morning service by a gunman spewing anti-Semitic hatred. We see…
Sermon by Rabbi David Wolpe: “Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for refuge.” This Samurai maxim inspired one gifted and courageous man to save thousands of people in defiance of his government and at the cost of his career. On Friday I came to Nagoya at the invitation of the Japanese government…
To be a Jew is to wonder where God is when bad things happen to good people, and, where God was when bad things happened to our people – like the Holocaust, and the Inquisition and the pogroms, and the recent death of Lisa, a 51 year old congregant, mother of 4 … and the…
Lech Lecha is the story of the start of the Jewish people. In this parasha, God tells Avram, or as we will come to know him, Abraham, to leave his home and go to the land that God will show to him. This land is, of course, Canaan, which we know today as Israel. God…
Jewish World Watch has collected sermon excerpts from rabbis throughout Los Angeles in honor of National Refugee Shabbat. We also received a wonderful excerpt from a Bar Mitzvah speech. “The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting” by Rabbi David Wolpe “Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for…