מהימים ההם לזמן הזה

Me-hayamin hahem laz’man hazeh

"From those days to these times"

This week Leonard Oppenheimer describes some of the work Beth Jacob has done to spread acts of loving kindness (gemilut hasadim) beyond our congregation. 

Expanding our circles of caring - Gemilut Hasadim

Our congregation is always looking for ways to live our values and to expand our circles of caring, from our synagogue community to the world around us.

An early expansion of that circle was to adopt the breakfast of the second Sunday of each month at the Dorothy Day Center in downtown St. Paul. For the past 35 years, neither rain nor blizzards stopped our rotating group of dedicated volunteers from cooking and serving meals for 250 hungry and homeless people.  

Over time, our youth group and our 20s/30s group also volunteered, seeing hunger and homelessness for themselves. Our work continues to this day -- we have already cooked and served 100,000 breakfasts. Some clients are surprised to learn that we are Jews from a synagogue. 

2012

By the late 1990s, our circle of caring also expanded to learning about immigrants’ struggles and advocating for policy changes.  We dealt with deportations, drivers licenses, working conditions and refugee resettlement.

From our connection with Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in St. Paul, we learned that undocumented immigrants were unable to get driver's licenses.  In cooperation with Jewish Community Action and ISAIAH, these discussions led to a state-wide advocacy campaign. Minnesota finally passed The Driver’s Licenses for All law in 2023.

Beth Jacob donors and volunteers also gathered money, furniture, and household goods to help welcome and resettle refugee families.  In 2017, we sponsored a Karen refugee family from Myanmar. In 2021, we sponsored an Afghan family.  Our dedicated Caring Circles supported both families for years beyond their initial resettlement  and continue to provide support to this day. 

In 2018, these gemilut hasadim efforts converged:  José Villezcas, the Dorothy Day Center kitchen supervisor we had worked with for many years, was targeted for deportation.  José had been imprisoned for committing a crime – the government prosecutor saw a  criminal meriting deportation – but we knew that he had turned his life around.  Many Beth Jacob congregants wrote letters and attended immigration court hearings, helping to successfully stop the deportation.  José later came to Beth Jacob to thank our community.  José has been promoted, remains a food facilities supervisor at multiple Catholic Charities facilities. Our volunteers are pleased to see his smiling face every few months when he passes through the Dorothy Day Center.

Contemporaneous Immigration Court Hearings – 2020 Artwork by and

© Anita White (used with permission)

What have we learned and what are our values? 

• To live our values, we must train for gemilut hasadim like a marathon, not a sprint. 
• We build community as we renew our commitment to alleviating hunger each month.
• One act of loving kindness leads to another: Our Dorothy Day connections led us to help immigrants and enabled a humane outcome for our friend and neighbor José.