TEL AVIV — The recent launch of Jewcology.com marked a small victory for Jewish communities everywhere and for the environment.
Evonne Marzouk and Noam Dolgin
Jewcology.com is an online social media portal and resource database aimed at promoting environmental activism throughout the Jewish world.
The brainchild of Evonne Marzouk, founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim, a Washington, D.C.-based, Torah-inspired environmental organization, Jewcology.com was created by 19 Jewish environmentalists from the United States, Canada, Israel, China and Chile.
They aimed to create a place for Jewish environmental activists to pool their resources, express their concerns and gather their expertise, and to conduct global campaigns aimed at mobilizing Jewish communities everywhere to act on the uniquely Jewish responsibility to protect the environment.
“The Jewish community is waking up to its environmental responsibility and is looking for resources to do the right thing,” said Noam Dolgin, the Canadian co-founder of Jewcology.com. He’s the Vancouver-based executive director of the Green Zionist Alliance, a non-profit aimed at mobilizing Jews around the world to protect Israel’s environment and support its environmental movement.
“Jewcology.com will help Jewish environmental professional and lay leaders connect with each other, share the latest ideas and co-ordinate community-wide campaigns,” Dolgin said.
He connected to Jewcology’s other 18 co-founders via the ROI (Return on Investment) Community for Young Jewish Innovators, a global network of 20- and 30-something Jewish community leaders from 40 countries established jointly by American Jewish philanthropist Lynn Schusterman’s Center for Leadership Initiatives and Taglit-Birthright Israel in 2006.
ROI awarded Jewcology.com $50,000 (US), one of five Innovation Fund grants distributed by ROI in 2010.
“Jewcology.com is the biggest and brightest example of the sort of collaboration that has emerged since we founded ROI,” said ROI director Justin Korda, who’s originally from Montreal. “It underscores the power of the global network of young Jewish innovators that we’ve been nurturing since 2006.”
Jewcology.com is able to involve the participation of so many members of the ROI network, said Korda, by virtue of the fact that the environmental cause is so multi-faceted.
“The environmental cause unites people from a lot of different fields, who come at the issue from different directions,” he said. “[Jewcology.com] gives Jews from all over the world a home to congregate in on environmental issues, without barriers of language and geography.”
In addition, said Korda, Jewcology.com fulfils an important ROI project objective – that it’s inspired by Jewish values. While all ROI members tackle the environmental cause from different angles, they are like-minded when it comes to their belief in the relevance of Jewish tradition to modern environmental challenges.
“The platform reveals how Jewish values inspire [the Jewish] commitment to strike a more harmonious relationship with the world and lead a more environmentally sound existence,” said Korda, who lists a few core Jewish environmental principles – the mitzvot baal tashchit [do not waste], tza’ar baalei chayim [proper treatment of animals] and l’ovdah u’l’shomerah [to work and guard] the world,” Korda said.
Dolgin added that “Jewish law and ethics deal with a wide range of questions regarding our relationship to the world and each other. These basic concepts address many of the same questions that we are facing today as our current ecological crisis threatens people and the planet.
“By empowering Jewish environmentalists to help the Jewish community address environmental issues, Jewcology.com will help the entire Jewish community understand the relevance of Jewish tradition to the modern environmental challenge, making Judaism more meaningful and relevant for the 21st century.”
So far, some 50 Jewish environmental activists and organizations, among them COEJL (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life), Hazon, the Shalom Center and the Teva Learning Center, have uploaded more than 300 resources in English, Hebrew, and Spanish to the site, including Jewish teachings, environmental texts, discussion questions, synagogue projects, blog posts, and awareness activity plans ranging in topic from vegetarianism, water, energy and agriculture to trees, food, recycling, and Jewish holidays.
The site features a special “community” for Canadian educators and activists, the Canadian Jewish Environmental Network.
“While many environmental concerns are global and require the same response worldwide, others are local and require a local response,” Dolgin said. “By having Canadian perspectives reflected on Jewcology.com, we will be able to share some of our unique successes and challenges with the global community, and we can provide a valuable resource to other Canadians looking for responses to regional environmental concerns.”
Jewcology.com is committed to taking the relationships formed online, offline, by hosting a variety of face-to-face meetings. Regional leadership training summits for Jewish environmentalists are planned for next March in Los Angeles and Baltimore, Md., and for next June in upstate New York.
One joint initiative, of the Green Zionist Alliance, Hazon, COEJL and the American Zionist Movement, the “Green Israel Summit,” took place in New York this past October.
“The Jewish environmental movement has always been a very collaborative movement, and there are a number of collaborations already underway between members of Jewcology.com. We hope that Jewcology.com will strengthen these connections and produce new partnership as well,” Dolgin said.
“Through this combined approach, we can reduce our footprint and become an efficient ‘light unto the nations.’”
