temple-sholom-vancouver_CBC News has an article on the efforts of Vancouver based Sholom Temple, a Jewish congregation, to sponsor two Syrian refugee families to resettle in Canada. To date members of the congregation have raised over CND $40,000 towards the sponsorship effort.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is quoted in the article;

It says 36 times in the Bible in the Old Testament to love the stranger…You don’t repeat something 36 times in the Bible unless it’s really, really important, and this is our obligation to see ourselves as them and to do what we can to save lives

While acknowledging that some members of the congregation had concerns about the sponsorship effort, considering the decades of hostilities between Israel and Syria, and the wide prevalence of antisemitism in the Middle East, Rabbi Moskovitz expressed his hope that the “effort will also work towards peace between Jews and Syrians.”

One by one, family by family, we can build bridges of understanding and hopefully reduce, at least on the micro scale, the conflict between the peoples

To read the entire article, click here.