Category: Front Page

We want to speak up. Whenever marginalized and minority communities are being attacked, we speak up and live as Upstanders, a term celebrated by our own local Holocaust & Humanity Center. Yet, the recent events in Israel and Gaza have caused our own interfaith leaders to pause and even be fearful of saying something, knowing for sure that one community or another will feel as though they’re not being heard.

Desperate times require that we stick together. For those who know us and our history of interfaith work, we were the National Conference of Christians and Jews, BRIDGES for a Just Community, and now EquaSion. We are a broad coalition of people of faith, who are always seeking to be inclusive, while moving the needle toward justice and peace. Following many conversations and e-discussions, we met as a board and agreed that our core values lead us to stand-up, rather than stand-by.

It’s complicated. We acknowledge there are trigger words being used that can shut down the conversation, inflame passions, and strike fear in those who live knowing that there are people who hate you, just because you live as “the other.” As a community, we are bewildered and disheartened by the tragic events that have unfolded over the last two months.

The horror continues. The horrors we initially witnessed in the attack by Hamas on Israel and capture of hostages were beyond words. 1,200 Israelis were killed as a result of the October 7th assault. Our hearts break for the families of those who have lost lives and the 300,000 Israelis who have been displaced. Our hearts break for the loss of life in Gaza, over 14,500 according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency says 1.7 million civilian Palestinians have been forced from their homes causing a humanitarian crisis.

It’s most definitely local. Even though this is all happening thousands of miles away, it is as local as it can be and is impacting us directly. We have relatives and friends caught up in the conflict. Our neighbors are taking to social media to express a side or a point of view. Our local universities are struggling with what to say, and how/when to make a statement. As more of our community members choose sides, we run the risk of dehumanizing our neighbors. Dehumanization leads to more hatred and violence.

This we know is true. We are neighbors. We work together. We break bread together. Our children go to school together. We must recognize the humanity in one another and will continue to fight antisemitism and Islamophobia right here in our own community. Despite our differences, we keep the lines of communication open, and we listen.

Phone a friend. The war is so far away. We feel helpless, not sure what we can do that’s constructive. As communities of faith, we pray for peace. We pray for humanity and an end to the fighting. As individuals, we can reach out to our neighbors who are feeling the pain of this conflict to let them know we’re thinking of them with words of love and support.

Respect for human life is the most basic tenet of all religions. EquaSion, a coalition of 12 world religions, has collected and will post prayers for peace in our monthly email and on our website in the coming days—please visit equasion.org. We call upon all people of faith to employ compassion through action as we pray for and work TOGETHER towards peace AND MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING HERE AT HOME.

– Board of Directors, EquaSion –
Umama Alam
Tammy Bennett, Esq.
James Buchanan, Ph.D.
Jan Armstrong Cobb
Alfonso Cornejo
Chip Harrod, J.D., Executive Director
Michael W. Hawkins, Esq.
Dan Hoffheimer, Esq.
Sandy Kaltman, Esq.
Aasees Kaur
Inayat K. Malik, M.D.
Raj Manglik, Ph.D.
Evans Nwankwo
Tamara Sullivan

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[P.S. We are encouraged by the current, albeit temporary, truce and hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, and we pray that this leads to the return of all hostages and an end to the hostilities. We are also keenly aware of the dramatic rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism as well as anti-Palestinian and anti-Israeli prejudice in America and around the world, and EquaSion stands firmly against hate in our communities and across the globe.]

* This is an excerpt, reprinted from Jewish Family Services.*

Dear friends and colleagues,

Jewish Family Service requests your help to encourage Jewish individuals or those living in Jewish households between the ages of 12 and 26 to complete a Youth Metal Health Survey, the results of which will help assess our community’s mental health gaps and needs for this age demographic.
That survey is accessible at the QR code and link below.
The Ask—please share this link and/or QR code in any upcoming external or internal communications such as emails, printed newsletters, or via your social media channels.
The survey was developed by the Jewish Federation of North America’s BeWell initiative, in consultation with Rosov Consulting. The Miami Jewish community has already fielded this survey.

The Backstory.

The Federation funded a one-year mental health pilot initiative at Jewish Family Service (JFS) in 2021. Last year, the Foundation committed three (3) years of support for JFS to expand that effort. Recently, the Foundation, in partnership with the Federation and JFS, launched a local Mental Health Resiliency Roundtable, comprised of professionals, practitioners, and community volunteers to work collectively to identify gap areas and generate creative solutions on how to address them.

Why is this Important? 

In an uncertain world, young people face increasing levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns of an accelerating mental health crisis, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide. Now that we’ve heard from them, we want to hear from their parents to determine where there is alignment and where additional work might need to be done.

Mobilizing for Change. 

As part of Cincinnati 2030, the Jewish community is mobilizing to create the support young people need as they face challenging moments. As a community, we are working to counteract:
  • Social stigma which prevents people from seeking help.
  • Lack of practical knowledge about the stressors young people face.
  • Professionals, educators and parents don’t know where to turn for information, guidance, or a supportive community.
  • A critical shortage of accessible or affordable mental health professionals.
Please help us get the word out starting today! JFS will share key take-aways with the community once results are final. Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Sincerely and Shabbat Shalom,
Brian Jaffee, Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati,
Danielle V. Minson, Jewish Federation of Cincinnati
Liz Vogel, Jewish Family Service

RefugeeConnect Welcomes Afghan Refugees to Cincinnati

RefugeeConnect’s mission is to connect refugees (people forced to flee their country to escape persecution or war) with resources to rebuild their lives as United States citizens. The Junior League of Cincinnati launched RefugeeConnect in 2013 after a routine community needs assessment determined that connecting refugees to existing resources was a pressing need for women and children in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. In 2018, RefugeeConnect became an independent nonprofit and today offers support to refugees across the region to navigate often unfamiliar systems, new cultural norms, and language barriers. RefugeeConnect promotes coordinated services so that this specific population of new Americans, who may be unaware of the patchwork of crucial resources already in place, reach their full potential as individuals, families, and civic and community leaders. Programs such as our Community Navigator program ensure that refugee families have access to information and resources in their native language. Our Community Navigators are cultural leaders, many of whom came here as refugees themselves. A Community Navigator will work to develop a strong relationship with identified families in need and help them navigate often complex and confusing systems while supporting a family’s long-term goals.

Our work is not done in a silo, as we recognize that for refugees to be successful in their new communities, we must all work together to create a more welcoming, safe, and supportive environment for our newest neighbors. This is why we partner with over 150 organizations and service providers across the region to ensure that refugees can access the myriad of social, financial, and health supports that will enable them to thrive. We partner with other nonprofits, faith communities, and healthcare providers through a collaborative effort to make the Greater Cincinnati area truly a welcoming city.

As the current administration announced that it will raise the Presidential ceiling of new refugee admittances to the United States and as the crisis unfolds in Afghanistan and we evacuate Afghan allies and process SIV applicants (special immigrant visas), we are preparing to welcome more refugees into our city. Our hope is that as there becomes a greater awareness of refugees across the globe and the need to resettle them, more people in our community will come forward as supporters and help us to welcome our newest neighbors.

RefugeeConnect specifically needs support through private donorship and volunteerism. You can donate directly to support our Community Navigator program, our Scholarship fund, or to assist our general operations by visiting our website at https://www.refugeeconnect.org/ . We are always looking for people who want to be more involved through volunteerism, such as being a peer or family mentor to a college aged student or family, sitting on a planning committee for our fundraising events, or helping us with administrative tasks. As the local resettlement agency, Catholic Charities of SW Ohio, prepares to welcome new refugees, they also need assistance with finding affordable housing to place refugee families, household goods, and volunteer support. Please, visit their website at https://www.ccswoh.org/programs/refugee-resettlement-services/ to learn more.

4th Annual Festival of Faiths  Acknowledges “We are in it Together”

Registration is Open as Hundreds Sign-up for Online Events Starting Sunday, August 22nd at EquaSion.org

CINCINNATI, OH – July 26, 2021 – The 4th Annual Cincinnati Festival of Faiths, the signature program of the interfaith group EquaSion, is drawing hundreds of online participants for a 7-day program, August 22 through 28. This year’s theme, “Compassion Through Action: We are in it Together,” will deliver a program filled with interfaith prayer, music, spiritual meditations, lunchtime webinars about faith, workshops for teachers and spiritual leaders, a panel discussion for youth, and more. Click Here to view the entire 2021 schedule of programs.

In its fourth year and in response to the lingering threat of the pandemic, the Festival will again be presented virtually.  More than 50 community leaders joined this year’s Festival of Faiths Co-Chairs Penny Pensak, Afreen Asif, Bishop Marvin Thomas Sr., and Jaipal Singh to create 15 events with broad appeal for communities of faith, families, and all individuals seeking inspiration from the collegial and respectful interfaith relations they will witness throughout the weeklong festival.

For the first time, the Festival is honoring a local individual as Honorary Chair of the Festival.  To inaugurate this recognition, the EquaSion board selected James P. Buchanan, Ph.D., the recently retired Executive Director of the Brueggeman Center for Dialogue at Xavier University.   Dr. Buchanan, a widely recognized scholar and civic leader, has devoted twenty years to promoting interfaith education, dialogue and collaboration both locally and nationally.  He is currently the director of Interfaith Cincy and A Blessing to One Another and serves on the boards of numerous charitable organizations.

The Festival activities will again embrace the 30 faith communities and 13 world religions that have participated in previous festivals. A few highlights include:

  • An Opening Interfaith Devotional involving prayers from more than a dozen religious traditions
  • Spiritual Meditations practiced by 10 different faith traditions (3 sessions)
  • Social Action workshop, ”Faith and Food:  Moving from Insecurity to Sustainability”
  • Compassionate Conversations:  “What is the meaning of GRIT?”
  • Workshop on “How to be a Sacred Activist for Racial Justice”
  • Beloved Community Youth Panel Discussion on the topic of Food Insecurity
  • “People Got to Be Free” – An Interfaith Celebration in Music, Song and Dance, followed by the Closing Interfaith Devotional on August 28th at 4:45 pm.

For a complete listing of events, days & times, and Zoom sign-up links for each, please visit https://www.equasion.org/festival-of-faiths/calendar-of-activities/

 

About EquaSion

EquaSion is a nonpartisan civic association whose mission is to promote Compassion through Action: acting on our compassion, we engage people of all faiths to discover their shared humanity and spirituality, and to work together for an equitable and just community for all. Its signature program is the Cincinnati Festival of Faiths. For more information on EquaSion’s interfaith community and the Cincinnati Festival of Faiths, visit www.equasion.org.

Green Umbrella’s Faith Communities Go Green Team invites you to take the Plastic Free EcoChallenge throughout the month of July!

  • Have you considered using reusable grocery bags, but have not remembered to take them out of your car before going to the grocery store?
  • Have you thought of reducing your plastics usage, but have been unsure of where and how to start to make the biggest impact?
  • Have you been interested in learning what happens to the plastics once you put them in your recycling bin, but haven’t had the time or motivation to do so?

    • If so, you are not alone. Many of us have the best of intentions, but have just not formed these good, environmentally-friendly habits yet.

    Joining the Plastic Free EcoChallenge can help you form some of these good habits.

    Our team “Cincinnati Area Faith Communities Go Green” will be one of several hundreds of teams from all over the world, competing to see who can make the biggest impact in reducing their plastics usage.

    The goal of EcoChallenge is to help us change our behavior towards a greener lifestyle, while doing so in a fun, collaborative, and mildly competitive environment.

    You can choose your level of involvement. You can sign up for, say, one one-time activity that you may spend an hour doing in the entire month. Or, you can sign up for a few daily activities and some one-time activities.

    Click Here To Read More

Our community leaders often say: an act of hate towards any one community is an act of hate towards all.

As upstanders in our community, we assert that Cincinnati is no place for hate. With the re-emergence of white supremacy in the wake of the 2016 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Cincinnatians came together and formed the Cincinnati Regional Coalition Against Hate (CRCAH). With rising division across our nation, it became critical to mobilize. Nineteen founding organizations created this non-partisan coalition; an allyship committed to vigilance against hate activity by supporting impacted communities and fostering acceptance, compassion, and justice for all across Greater Cincinnati. Today, there are more than 40 partner organizations working together to educate the community and monitor incidents of hate in our community. Our rapid response model allows us to effectively respond to hate activity within 24 hours by leveraging a diverse network as the connective tissue between communities thereby providing key resources specific to any particular community. Whether incidents occur on the street, in the workplace, or at school, CRCAH is able to tap into community leaders as needed.

Read More…

By: Navkiran Chima

This opinionated-editorial was adapted from a speech given by Navkiran Chima, founder and President of Miami University’s Sikh Student Association, at the Candlelight Vigil on April 22nd for the victims of the FedEx hate crime / mass shooting in Indianapolis, IN held at the SEAL on Miami University’s campus.

A link to an article covering the vigil can be found here: https://www.fox19.com/2021/04/22/miami-u-students-hold-vigil-sikh-lives-lost-indy-shooting/

The news of the shooting in Indianapolis was heartbreaking and infuriating. Gun violence is a repeated and unchanging problem in our country. The xenophobic, racist, and targeted nature of this shooting was an act of hate and white supremacy, but furthermore it was one against my community and my identity. My family and I are always potential victims.

It feels like we are in a vicious cycle of anti-Asian hate crimes and racist police brutality. The deaths of Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, George Floyd, and Ma’Khia Bryant were all products of systemic racism. The murder of eight people in this mass shooting, four of them Sikh, is a product of hate. When are we able to catch our breath? When does the disregard for black and brown bodies end? When will the proliferation of hate cease? It is devastating that we as a nation have become numb to these crimes due to their recurrent nature.

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by James P Buchanan, PhD

At the core of every faith tradition is a reverence for creation. This is a belief that creation is sacred and thus should be both honored within the tradition. Care for creation should is foundational to the moral vision of every religious tradition. In recent years more and more attention has been paid by all of the world’s faith traditions to what that the moral responsibility entails and how faith traditions can play an important role in- confronting the growing climate crisis. This is not only based in the recognition that the climate crisis is an existential threat, it is also a theological imperative.

To help our faith communities better realize this imperative and the resources available to them, Green Umbrella (https://greenumbrella.org/) the regional sustainability alliance of Greater Cincinnati, is providing a new platform for collective, interfaith action.

Green Umbrella, has over 200 member organizations and over 200 individual members who are passionate about enhancing the environmental health and vitality of our region. Their mission is to lead collaboration, incubate ideas and catalyze solutions that create a resilient sustainable region for all. Working together they envision a vibrant community where sustainability is woven into our ways of life. Green Umbrella serves a 10-county region in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

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Thank you members and friends of InterfaithCincy for pouring your support to our open letter issued by our board chair Lee Wong, US Army (retired), with over 20 years of active-duty service (24/7) to the nation.

With nearly 90 advocacy groups and individuals from the region co-signing this letter, we stand in solidarity and with the resolve that together we say NO, loud and clear, to hate, to violence, and to racial discrimination and biases.

But that’s not enough. We must take actions to prevent the next tragedy from happening. While we can go through the routines and let ourselves be buried in the entanglement of processes and bureaucracies, we can take these actions to move forward:

1. Endorse this letter and condemn publicly the violence and microaggressions on Asian people.
2. Call for legislation to establish clear definitions of hate crimes towards Asian people. Current federal laws make it extremely difficult to define and prosecute a hate crime aimed towards Asian people in this country.
3. Call for tougher penalties on first-time violations of hate crimes. Many offenders walk free without any penalty.
4. Increase the visibility of Asian Americans in senior and top leadership in both the government and the private sectors.
5. Promote diversity, inclusion and awareness of Asian culture and history, especially the history of Asian immigrants and their contribution to this country. We offer webinars that talk specifically about the history of East Asian countries and business etiquettes. Please encourage your colleagues to join us.

Read More…

White supremacist group vandalizes banner, leaves stickers
BY HUNTER ELLIS AND CHLOE SALVESON, MANAGING MULTIMEDIA EDITOR AND STAFF WRITER

Xavier Police (XUPD) and the Bias Action Response Team (BART) are investigating the vandalism of a “Black Lives Matter” banner displayed in front of Bellarmine Chapel, and stickers promoting the White nationalist group Patriot Front were found posted across campus earlier today. The vandalism on campus happened concurrently with an admissions event at which many prospective students toured Xavier.

An XU Alert Me message sent this evening alerted students of the vandalism and stickers, specifying that there is no evidence at this time to indicate that the stickers were placed by a member of the Xavier community. Part of the message read: “Xavier is aware that material from a group that advocates extremist ideologies (were found on campus)… and that a Black Lives Matter sign was vandalized… XUPD has removed the material and is investigating the situation. Hate has no home in the Xavier community.”

The banner, which read “Racism is a Sin: Black Lives Matter” has allegedly been sliced twice with an unspecified object, before it was taken down by XUPD on Saturday afternoon.

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