A journey to rebuild a burned-out Southern church has grown into a multicultural education project designed to get young people talking to each other about race.
At the center of the project is “Be Encouraged,” a documentary set to be released in April, which tells the story of 23 young people who traveled to Greensboro, Ala., during spring break in 1997 to rebuild one of the many African-American churches destroyed in a wave of arson attacks.
Those volunteers included Bay Area Jewish, African-American, Latino, and Asian-American college students and recent graduates.
At a meeting this fall at U.C. Berkeley, 75 students from those same ethnic groups sat down together in a Cal dorm to watch excerpts from the film.
Then they started talking.
“At least half of what we are trying to do happens when the film is over,” said Yoav Potash of Berkeley, who filmed the 1997 trip and is now producing the documentary. The “Be Encouraged” project will include an educational kit with questions to spark discussions among the middle school, high school, and college students who constitute its target audience.
Berkeley Hillel and Jewish students at U.C. Berkeley have been involved in the project all along.
Yossi Hets-Ohana, then assistant director of student activities at Hillel, came up with the idea for the trip and accompanied the volunteers to Alabama, according to Potash. Now Hillel is acting as fiscal sponsor for “Be Encouraged,” though individuals can earmark contributions to the project as well.
“The whole genesis of the trip began at a Jewish organization, and a significant part of our target audience are the young Jewish people of today,” said Potash, 25, a Berkeley resident who graduated from the university shortly before joining the trip to Alabama.
“We plan a lot of community screenings” through Hillel Foundations and other Jewish organizations. The Jewish Community Federation, for example, recently provided a “significant grant” through its Jewish Community Endowment Fund, he added.
The project fits in with an interest in other cultures at Hillel Foundations nationwide, said Potash. It’s a trend he believes may attract Jewish college students who want to join an organization which does not limit itself strictly to Jewish issues.
Hillel has received grants “to create opportunities for Jewish students to network” with students of other cultures, said Rabbi Rona Shapiro, executive director of Berkeley Hillel. That funding helped pay for the 1997 trip.
During the screening at U.C. Berkeley, one of the participants from the trip reflected on the shared experience of discrimination. “I knew there were a lot of people in the South who really don’t like Jews, who really don’t like African-Americans, who really don’t like all of the different kinds of people that our group was composed of,” commented Claire Zellman, 19, now a third-year U.C. Berkeley student.
“Our history is a history of anti-Semitic violence,” Zellman added in a later telephone interview, “and we should rise up” in response to violence against other groups.
“It’s not one people’s problem,” agreed Potash. He is working with PBS Adult Learning Center, the educational distribution arm of PBS, to develop a Web site as part of the “Be Encouraged” project. That site will include not only information on arson directed at African-American churches, but the history of attacks on other houses of worship, including synagogues in Europe.
Information about the “Be Encouraged” project can be obtained from Summit Pictures, at (510) 649-0298.