Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

AJWS Invites U.S. Jewish Communities to Observe Global Hunger Shabbat, Nov. 4-5, 2011

JRF Hunger and Poverty Resources: http://jrf.org/hunger

AJWS invites you to join us in observing Global Hunger Shabbat—a day of solidarity, education, reflection and activism to raise awareness about global hunger.

Global Hunger Shabbat will be an opportunity for Jews nationwide to unite for this common cause and to raise our collective voices against the injustice that is claiming lives around the world. As Jews, social justice has always been in our prayers and our actions, and this day of solidarity is designed to bring about our deepest impulse for effecting change. This year, Global Hunger Shabbat will take place in the weeks prior to Thanksgiving, linking our work in pursuit of global food justice to this season of gratitude.

To make it simple to organize Global Hunger Shabbat in your own community, AJWS will provide an array of educational tools to suit various groups and audiences. Use them to organize Shabbat dinner, a day of study or a Shabbat-long program in your home, school, campus or synagogue – simply sign up here! You can view the materials from last year’s Global Hunger Shabbat.

Global Hunger Shabbat is part of AJWS’s campaign, Fighting Hunger from the Ground Up.

Details to follow. E-mail hungershabbat@ajws.org or contact Ilan Caplan at 212.792.2906 to learn more!

To help individuals, congregations and communities organize and host their own Global Hunger Shabbat events on March 19th, AJWS has created an online toolkit (available at www.ajws.org/hungershabbat), which includes:

• Talking points about hunger and the food insecurity crisis
• An original prayer and sermon prompts designed for the synagogue or community setting
• A Jewish text study and family activity
• “Solidarity Plates” to designate an empty seat at the Shabbat table meant to represent the 1.1 billion people facing hunger worldwide
• Readings for use around the Shabbat table featuring stories about hunger and the solutions communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America are developing to fight it
• Suggestions for ways that American Jews and their communities can take action
• A poster and a community newsletter ad to help publicize Global Hunger Shabbat

AJWS and its grantess in Africa, Asia and the Americas believe that a local approach to realizing the human right to food will most effectively halt food insecurity worldwide. AJWS implements this approach by supporting grassroots change by and for local people in myriad ways—teaching farmers to grow food using sustainable farming methods; endowing communities with seed banks and harvest storage facilities; founding agricultural cooperatives and jumpstarting profitable local markets; and empowering indigenous communities to advocate for their land and water rights. Global Hunger Shabbat offers the American Jewish community an opportunity to join AJWS and its grassroots partners in supporting these critical solutions.

Global Hunger Shabbat toolkits and more information about the program are available at www.ajws.org/hungershabbat. These materials are part of an ongoing collection of educational resources that AJWS has created on global justice topics.