U.S. Fellows

The T’ruah Rabbinical and Cantorial Student Summer Fellowship in Human Rights offers a select cohort of rabbinical/cantorial students an eight week experience working in a human rights/social justice organization in New York, learning about human rights in Jewish text and tradition, and gaining the skills to be human rights leaders in your own communities. Learn...
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A Commitment to Justice Means Remembering Our Tribes

But whether or not the Sinai wilderness was ever ownerless as the midrash suggests, in North America, the so-called wildernesses never have been. Those places — and indeed every square mile of North America — have always been, and continue to be, the home of specific tribes of Indigenous peoples.
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Purell, Red Heifers, and Why Not Being Racist Isn’t Enough

And at some point, I looked down at my hands and my children’s hands, spotless from washing, no dirt under our nails, and I thought about the historical chain of racist violence and state-sanctioned brutality that our hands grasped. Our social system makes certainty of our cleanliness an impossibility. Quite the opposite: we are all unclean, no matter how much we may have washed.
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2013 Rabbinic Letter on Bedouin Rights

In 2013, nearly 800 rabbis, cantors, and rabbinical and cantorial students signed this letter, which was delivered to the Israeli government. As spiritual and Jewish community leaders who care deeply about the State of Israel, we write to you in solidarity with concerned Jewish and Arab Israelis to urge you to withdraw the Bill on...
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My trip to Immokalee

CONGREGATION SHA’AREI KODESH 2nd Day of Passover MARCH 27, 2013 ©  RABBI LOUIS RIESER   Hag kasher v’Sameah. I want to thank Rabbi Baum for this invitation to speak about my experience in Immokalee with T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.  In January I joined 9 other rabbis to learn first-hand about the conditions...
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Parashat Bamidbar: The Imperative to Provide Refuge

My father’s family were refugees from Vienna, who fled just before World War II broke out, but not before my grandfather had been deported to Dachau. He remained incarcerated there from November 13, 1938, until January 19, 1939. He knew he had to leave Austria with his family. But leaving wasn’t easy. First, it meant...
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At What Cost

Earlier this summer, before the fighting began in Israel, I led a birthright trip. From June 16th-26th, there was one issue on the minds of nearly every Israeli I met: the kidnapping of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah, the Israeli teens who were taken on June 12th. Throughout the trip, we knew nothing...
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