When Aryeh Cooperstock last visited Ethiopia’s northern Gondar region, just this past September, he found a people slowly and steadily recovering from the despairing effects of the famine that still ravaged the country in 1985. Crops were growing as tall as his head and as many as 60,000 Ethiopians were benefitting from American contributions of oxen, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm implements.
But when Cooperstock returns to Gondar next week, he is fearful of what he might find. This time parts of the region have seen too much rain, and while other regions of Ethiopia face a drought as severe as 1984’s, Cooperstock worries that much of the recovery he has encouraged, as the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s International Development Fund, will literally be washed away.
JDC’s aid to Gondar, where the majority of Ethiopia’s 20,000 Jews live, is the latest and most vivid example of that Jewish organization’s low-profile effort to extend help where it is needed most.
“As Jews, we have an ethical imperative to help others,” said Cooperstock, explaining the raison d’etre of JDC’s programs in more than 70 countries. “Of course, we go where Jews are, in hopes of improving the image and status of Jews living there.”
Using that approach, the “Joint” (as JDC is called for short) is active in Kenya, where Israeli experts under its sponsorship work on a goat-raising project with Kenyan farmers; in Morocco, where “Project Carolyn” provides dental care for children in impoverished areas; and in El Salvador, where, together with the tiny Jewish community there, the JDC rebuilt a kindergarten in one of the poorest neighborhoods.
But the JDC’s most dramatic, and possibly understated, efforts in recent years have taken place in Gondar. There, Jews left behind after 1984’s Operation Moses live virtually indistinguishably from their non-Jewish neighbors, living in one-room mud “tukuls” and tending small plots of land.
NEW FAMINE EXPECTED
As a result, they face what at least one organization, the American Association for Ethiopian Jews, is calling a repetition of the 1984-85 famine, when 3,000 Jews were included among the approximately one million Ethiopians who died of starvation and disease (out of a total Ethiopian population of 45 million).
According to a spokesman for the United States Agency for International Development (AID), the United States has already this year provided 142,000 tons of food and $56,6 million in aid.
As in other countries, the aid JDC is providing to Ethiopia must be non-sectarian — the Joint is allowed to work with Jews, but not only with Jews, Cooperstock said.
“We never didn’t help non-Jews,” he said. On the other hand, while JDC never hides its Jewishness, “we don’t flaunt it either,” he added.
At the time of the 1983 famine, JDC channeled to starving Ethiopians more than $4 million in cash, food, medicine and clothing donated by the American Jewish community.
As the famine subsided, the JDC returned to the long-term development programs it had begun as early as 1983. They include a medical clinic in the village of Tedda and the training there of traditional birth attendants, a recently-inaugurated clinic in Gondar City, improvements in the region’s water supply and a ceramics project in the Waleka area.
According to Cooperstock, Ethiopians import even the tiny cups they use for drinking coffee, and the ceramics project is exploring ways of manufacturing and marketing pottery and building materials using Ethiopia’s indigenous clay deposits.
The Joint’s agricultural project, successful up until this year’s unfortunate weather, operates with the assistance of $1.3 million in grants from United States AID and an additional $150,000 from USA for Africa’s Live-Aid campaign.
LIMITS ON USE OF FUNDS
The bulk of JDC’s $55 million budget comes from United Jewish Appeal funds earmarked for “international concerns.” But because U.S. law limits American funding in “unfriendly” Marxist states like Ethiopia to “recovery” projects only, the JDC has been turning to Jewish communities in Denmark, Sweden and Canada for assistance in its development projects.
“We’re asking the Swedes and others to go to their big international development agencies and ask them to make funds available,” said Cooperstock. “The Danes approached their development officials and they were delighted to honor a Jewish request.”
The JDC’s International Development Fund is not the only American Jewish relief organization providing aid to developing countries. For instance, the Boston-based American Jewish World Service, founded in 1985, is meeting this week with international disaster specialists to discuss impending food shortages in Ethiopia.
According to the group’s president, Laurence Simon, the World Service has also been planning a response to direct requests from independent relief committees in the war-torn Ethiopian provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. They hope to apply the advanced Israeli grain storage techniques that they have introduced in Sri Lanka, Togo and the Philippines.
Cooperstock acknowledges the work of the AJWS. “There’s room for two flowers in the garden,” he said.
Still, Cooperstock is proud of the JDC’s standing in the international community. “The Ethiopian government has said we are an example of how an effective NGO (non-governmental organization) should work,” he said.
Cooperstock’s return to Africa next week will be undertaken with the Interfaith Hunger Appeal, a coalition that includes Catholic, Lutheran and other relief organizations.
He worries that the public will not respond to the current famine as it did in 1984, and he hopes publicity surrounding the interfaith mission will “raise the level of public awareness about the impact of hunger.”
“This time around the Ethiopian government has acknowledged and asked for assistance,” said Cooperstock. “I’m just afraid people will suffer from ‘donor fatigue,’ People won’t respond because it happened before.
“But the effects of this famine will be the same. Starvation, unrest, refugees. We want to show not just what hunger is, but what hunger causes.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
