1. Action Alert (Hat Tip: YS)

You can help in the effort to overturn the Presbyterian Church’s harmful resolutions on Israel.

At its 216th General Assembly in early July, the Presbyterian Church (USA) passed several resolutions – called “overtures” in Presbyterian Church parlance – which have been cause for great alarm in the Jewish community. Attention has focused on three of these overtures:

· One that endorses “selected” divestment from companies doing business in Israel;

· One that condemns the construction of the security barrier in Israel;

· And one, had it passed, would have ended the national funding for "messianic" congregations that target Jews for proselytization and conversion.

The most impactful resolution regarding Israel is the one on divestment. It calls for the church to “initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.”

Also, in October a delegation from the Presbyterian Church (USA) met with leaders of Hizbullah in Lebanon, openly praising the terrorist organization. The furor over this meeting, both from the Jewish community and from within the PC (USA), resulted in disciplinary actions taken against two senior staff members, who were fired.

Some in our community have issued calls to disengage from dialogue. This would be counterproductive, and in fact the actions taken by the Church over the Hizbullah meeting would not have been possible had it not been for ongoing and developing dialogue with the Jewish community.

We do indeed have friends in the Presbyterian Church, many more than we would initially have thought. Nationally, a group called Presbyterians Concerned for Jewish Christian Relations has taken a strong stand against this overture, and is working to prevent its implementation.

Locally, a number of ministers including Rev. Doug Huneke of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon, Rev. Art Mills of the Stone Church in Los Gatos, and others are working closely with the JCRC, ADL, the Board of Rabbis of Northern California and other groups, to coordinate strategy and activities.

And a number of local rabbis have reached out to meet with their Presbyterian clergy colleagues, , to initiate dialogue, to explain how these overtures are harming local Jewish-Presbyterian relations.

YOU CAN HELP

Please take the time to write a brief letter of indignation over the divestment issue coupled with a strong statement of broken trust over the other issues. Three crisp sentences will do it and you should end with a request for a response.

ACTION:
· Urge your friends, family, associates, membership to write letters.
· Urge your rabbi and synagogue board to write a letter to the “Stated Clerk” of the local Presbytery (see below). Letters to the Stated Clerk must officially be read into the record, according the Presbyterian Church rules.

· Urge your rabbi to become involved in this effort. Most needed are meetings with local Presbyterian ministers and lay leaders (elders), to open dialogue, to urge them to take a position of opposition to their denomination’s resolution on divestment in particular.

· Coordinate this effort with the JCRC, which is working closely with the Northern California Board of Rabbis, the ADL, American Jewish Committee, Hadassah and others. (There is a form that needs to be filled out by participants in Jewish-Presbyterian dialogues, that will be shared with our national agencies.)

IMPORTANT! All communications should go to the “Stated Clerk” (i.e. executive director) whether nationally or at local Presbyteries, since this would then require the Stated Clerk to read the letters into the denomination’s official record.

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NATIONAL

Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA)
100 Witherspoon Street
Louisville, KY 40202-1396

Email: This is a form on the Presbyterian Church’s website. Go to the following web address to fill out the form:

http://www.pcusa.org/form2mail/form2mail.jsp?f2name=Clifton+Kirkpatrick&subject=email+directory

LOCAL

The Rev. Katherine J. Runyeon
Stated Clerk
The Presbytery of San Francisco
2024 Durant Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704

Elder Joan Runyeon,
Interim Stated Clerk
The Presbytery of the Redwoods
1226-A Salvador Ave.
Napa, CA 94558

John Lococo,
Stated Clerk
The Presbytery of San José
888 N. First Street, Suite 320
San José, CA 95112

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2. A research paper concerning "Human Rights Advocacy in the Mainline Protestant Churches", which touches on mainline Protestant churches and Israel, was published by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). The report's conclusions state, inter alia:

The mainline churches are not adequately addressing the wide range of human rights abuses taking place around the world. The greatest energy is spent in criticizing the United States and Israel, while far less energy is spent in criticizing other nations with human rights abuses that are greater in both number and severity. Some areas of the globe are ignored by the church, despite being the home of some of the worst human rights abusers.Mainline churches have focused disproportionately on a few free nations whose abuses are of limited extent and severity, while largely ignoring some nations whose citizens suffer pervasive oppression and violence.In the 970s and 980s, the mainline churches routinely backed Soviet-sponsored “liberation” movements throughout the world. And yet they were blind to the tyranny imposed by the Soviet Union on its own people and in the Eastern Bloc nations in Europe. Their worldview, which held the United States responsible for most of the world’s conflicts, contributed heavily to this blindness. It was only too late, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, that the church admitted its failings.