Points of Jew

Time for community to support victims of sexual abuse

I've been contacted by a US organisation - The Awareness Center, which is a voluntary group aimed to raise awareness and help those who are victims of sexual abuse.

Are we as a community in the UK doing enough to help those who are victims of sexual abuse, or are we just trying to ignore the problem in the hope it will just "go away" by its own means.

The Awareness Center has plenty of useful infomation to help those in need and indeed to just generally raise public awareness of the problem.

When was the last time you saw a UK community campaign to deal with this?  We have to face up to the fact that the Jewish community is no different from other communities, there are those within it that have been abused and we need to look at how we support them.

Learning from American Jews - we need to make our community more inclusive

In the United States, October is being made North American Inclusion Month by the Orthodox Union.

The OU is taking a lead by promoting positive inclusion of people with limited or no mobility at synagogues, which of course includes its own.

With a powerful ad that says "Every Jew Belongs in Shul" the message is pretty clear to the community, both its own Orthodox as well as others. We need to stop the discrimination being shown to Jews who cannot get to shul because of lack of access.

OU president Stephen J. Savitsky said:

“We want the message to go out from the Orthodox Union as a whole that inclusion is vital to the Jewish community, and that all of our children and adults who have disabilities must be included in all activities of our community – with an emphasis on their comfort and participation in the life of their synagogues,”

UK Jewish groups and communal leaders take note. Let's stop talking about doing things, let's actually start doing things now.

My own personal view of how badly the UK Jewish community treats those with limited or no mobility can be found in a comment piece written for SomethingJewish. Click here to read it.