An extraordinary gathering took place last weekend in Danville when more than 80 Bay Area Muslims learned about the work one organization is doing to help Syrian refugees. An organization that happens to be Israeli.
Pakistani American Mir Aamir, who lives in the Bay Area, has seen that work up close. He recounted for the group the three days he and his family spent last summer in Berlin at a refugee center staffed by IsraAid, a nongovernmental aid organization. The Danville group listened to his account and watched part of a 10-minute film Mir’s 13-year-old daughter created to introduce her classmates to the refugees she met and show how IsraAid is helping them.
When IsraAid global partnerships director Yotam Polizer rose to tell the group that his organization was based in Tel Aviv and that he needed all of their help, it was a plea grounded not in politics but in humanity.
Indeed, this gathering had nothing to do with Tel Aviv, Ramallah or anti-Israeli activity on campus. It wasn’t about the Arab-Israeli conflict at all.
It was about goodhearted people from around the world, doctors and nurses, Muslims, Jews, Christians and followers of no religion, banding together to help desperate refugees fleeing war and violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
Polizer spoke of refugees he met on Lesbos, the Greek island where last fall, upwards of 7,000 hungry, frightened women, men and children washed ashore every day from Turkey in overcrowded lifeboats.
“And they were greeted by the last people they expected to see — Israelis,” Polizer said.
IsraAid is opening its first U.S. office later this month in San Francisco. The choice of location is no accident. The Bay Area has a long commitment to social justice activism, locally and around the world. Polizer has spoken to a number of Bay Area student groups this year, Jewish and non-Jewish, and dozens of volunteers have joined IsraAid efforts already. Most were Jewish. But some, like the Aamirs, were not.
Polizer told of a 2-year-old Syrian girl he rescued from the cold waters off Lesbos last November, shivering with hypothermia. Her father, an engineer from Damascus, said he’d never met a Jew before. But that day, on an island in Greece, Polizer said the man told him, “My worst enemy has become my biggest support.”
We welcome IsraAid and its staff to the Bay Area. May they go from strength to strength, building bridges between communities as they help make the world a better place.