Feb. 7, 2016: The rabbi who rallies American Jews for the global refugee cause
People like HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and its HIAS vice president, Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, want to flood your community with poisonous snakes like Islamic Orlando killer Omar Mateen.
The Syrian refugee crisis keeps Rabbi Jennie Rosenn up at night. However for her, the worry goes beyond personal concern to professional responsibility. As the relatively new vice president for community engagement at the refugee assistance organization HIAS, she is tasked with mobilizing the American Jewish community in the face of the world’s largest refugee situation since World War II.
Before arriving at HIAS in 2014, Rosenn, 47, played a leading role in the field of Jewish service as the director of the Jewish Life and Values Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
“I moved to HIAS and refugees because I sought to get closer to the ground on a real issue,” Rosenn said in a recent interview with The Times of Israel.
The timing was auspicious, as the global refugee crisis could not be more urgent than it is right now, with the events of the last months having made Rosenn’s job easier — and also much harder.
On one hand, Americans’ attention was captured by media coverage last year of more than a million Syrian and other Middle Eastern migrants and refugees making perilous sea journeys to reach European shores, and flooding across borders on foot. And after photos of drowned three-year-old Kobani-born Alan Kurdi were shared widely on social media, sympathy grew further for the refugees.
