I am surprised that The Jewish Week published the false assertion that T’ruah, the organization I lead, and others, are suffering from a funding squeeze, based solely on an inflammatory assertion by Gerald Steinberg, the president of NGO Monitor (“Human Rights Groups In Israel Feeling The Funding Squeeze,” Charitable Giving section, Nov. 9).
NGO Monitor is an organization closely affiliated with the Israeli government and offers false information and insinuations about human rights organizations. It claims to monitor transparency in other organizations while shielding its own finances from scrutiny, according to a recent study by the Policy Working Group. NGO Monitor’s original home, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, even split with members of the group citing “the difficulty to ascertain the correctness of the facts presented.”
In fact, T’ruah, like many other American and Israeli organizations working in the social justice sphere, has seen a tremendous growth in funding over the past several years. That’s because, unlike Steinberg and NGO Monitor, the majority of Jews subscribe to the value of protecting the human rights of all people, and recognize that the only way to ensure a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians will be to end the 51-year occupation, and to bring about a solution that ensures dignity and security for all people in the region. Unlike NGO Monitor, which reports only seven donors (and reveals the identity of only three of them), T’ruah enjoys the support of several thousand American Jews, and publishes the names of these donors, who are proud to be associated with an organization that brings a moral voice to human rights.
Executive Director, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
