Recently I read that American Jewish World Service is cutting back on its global service-learning programs. Over the years, AJWS has sent tens of thousands of idealistic young Jews to work on long-term projects throughout the Third World — digging wells in Africa, building schools in Central America — all in the name of tikkun olam.
The decision to cut back wasn’t made for spurious reasons. According to a Dec. 14 article in the Forward, AJWS wants to focus more of its efforts on domestic advocacy, influencing U.S. policies in developing nations. That’s a worthy goal. Still, I can’t help but be saddened.
One might question how much actual good the volunteers do in their target communities — can a bunch of Western college students really lay pipes better than the local population? But the good they do themselves is undeniable.
I think back to my own first experience on kibbutz. It was 1974, I was a spoiled 16-year-old kid from New Jersey, and for six months I worked in the kibbutz kitchen learning how to mop floors and clean toilets from women with numbers tattooed on their arms. For the first time in my life, I felt useful.
That’s what a serious service-learning project can do for young people. It shows them they can make a difference, right now. It teaches them how to adapt, how to listen, how to negotiate differences. It shows them their limits, and their potential.
Two weeks ago I went to a presentation at San Francisco’s Goethe-Institut to hear about another service-learning project — one that is expanding rather than cutting back, and hopes to open a Bay Area branch soon. It’s a remarkable, German-based organization called Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP). Founded in 1958 by a Protestant group determined to atone, however inadequately, for the horrors of the Holocaust, ARSP has sent more than 15,000 volunteers, mostly young non-Jewish Germans, to help elderly Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe, Britain, the United States and Israel — the victims of their grandparents’ crimes, not theirs.
I came across some of those volunteers 15 years ago at Kibbutz Givat Brenner, which was founded largely by German-speaking Jews. As survivors on the kibbutz retreated into old age, many slipped back into the language of their youth. Having young German speakers help them with the increasingly difficult tasks of daily living was, for many, a godsend.
I remember one young German man, maybe 19 years old, assigned to a Holocaust survivor in her 80s. What had been a tense relationship at first, complicated by his residual guilt feelings and her trepidation, had relaxed into a loving friendship. She found a German who was kind, who helped rather than hurt. He found a Jew to whom he could reach out.
Another thing: Many Germans today have never met a Jew — there are simply too few in their country. Peter Rothen, the eloquent and worldly German consul general in San Francisco, said that he never met any Jews until he came to the United States. He’s continually humbled, he said, by the emotional generosity of the survivors he encounters. “As a German, it’s an incredible experience when a person pulls up their sleeve and there’s a number tattooed,” he told the Goethe- Institut audience. “And when that person is kind to you, it’s terrible.”
The answer? One is service-learning programs like ARSP, which today sends 160 volunteers each year to 13 countries. And not only do Germans work in social action and Jewish programs in America; American volunteers now work at Dachau and other memorial sites in Germany. The cross-pollination is critically important, said American Jewish photojournalist Alvin Gilens, who spent years interviewing ARSP volunteers for his new book, “Reconciling Lives.”
“This is the last generation of German youth who will be able to talk with survivors, befriend them, see the numbers on their arms,” Gilens told the audience. “Then the survivors will be gone. The perpetrators also.”
Sue Fishkoff is the editor of j., and can be reached at [email protected].