24 Shares 0



24

0







Canadian synagogue Temple Har Zion in the Thornhill neighborhood of Toronto has partnered with the mosque next door called Imam Mahdi Islamic Centre to sponsor Syrian refugees fleeing war and violence in their homeland.

The joint Jewish-Muslim initiative hopes to sponsor and resettle two Syrian refugee families in Toronto.

Co-chair of the THZ-IMIC Refugee Project as it has been dubbed, Andrew Hazen pointed out that there are 4 million Syrians trying to escape civil war, plus millions more internally displaced or living in refugee camps across the Middle East.

The group hopes to raise $60,000 in order to sponsor two families through the Jewish Immigrant Aid Service (JIAS) in Toronto.

“[JIAS] has been doing this kind of work, helping refugees and immigrants resettle in this area for 100 years,” Hazen said.

The $60,000 will go to providing financial support to the families at a rate equal to that provided by the government to refugees.

Lia Kisel, language and settlement director at JIAS, said the real difficulty lies not raising the funds but in the actual integration of the refugee families into Canadian society.

“The settlement plan is going to be created in partnership with Temple Har Zion. We not only need your assistance to secure the funds, but we need your assistance also to volunteer your time after the refugees arrive, which is when the real hard work begins, to settle and integrate the families,” she said.

There are already approximately 25,000 refugees resettled in Canada. And while more is always better, the plight of the refugees once they reach Canada is often missed.

In contrast to the goodwill of the Har Zion synagogue, this very day in Canada, the Jewish Defense league is hosting far rightwing British politician Paul Weston in Toronto. His purpose is to reveal “the threat of radical Islamic immigration and the erosion of our freedoms,” as reported by The Star.

Meanwhile, there is a serious undercurrent of Islamophobic and xenophobic in Canada. An online petition by Care2 asks the Canadian government “stop resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada.” The petition as of 10 March has received nearly 50,000 signatures, along with virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Seeking to mitigate some of this vitriol in the refugees’ Canadian experience, co-chair Hazen preceded the start of fundraising by assuring the refugees have gone through the proper immigration channels.

“We’ve looked at it carefully, and the folks who come through the refugee program are screened and vetted and interviewed and fingerprinted and photographed and run through databases by the UN. And then Canadian immigration officials do it all over again, making sure their stories match, their places match, names match, faces match and so on… Honestly, if someone with nefarious intentions wanted to get into the country, there are so many easier ways to do it than through the refugee program,” Hazen said.

There is no doubt that this kind of reassurance is a product of anti-refugee rhetoric pushing the debate further rightward.

Nevertheless, the Jewish commitment to solidarity and aid of refugees is obvious.

Rabbi Weiss of the Har Zion Synagogue quoted the Torah for its oft-repeated commandments to love the stranger. Not to mention the fact that Jews have been refugees many times over, most recently during World War II when the Nazis exterminated some 6 million European Jews while the rest of the world failed to act.

“Jews certainly understand this feeling. The phrase, ‘None is too many,’ was coined for us, for our ancestors trying to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Only 4,000 Jewish refugees were permitted in Canada before and during World War II. We know, all too well, the fate that befell the rest who tried to come, but were stopped at the door,” he said.