Community message
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- Community Message
LISTENING, LEARNING, AND LEADING
From open forums to tackling hate, here’s how the JCCV is working for you this week.
TELLING OUR STORY
The JCCV holds multiple community forums – plenums – each year. It is in the JCCV’s DNA to listen to our member organisations, learn about their concerns and prepare responses.
These forums are free and are open to the whole community to attend.
This Monday night, we will hold our August Plenum where the community can hear reports from JCCV office bearers, ask questions and then participate in a panel discussion on the topic Media lens: How media is reporting on the local Jewish community. Participating in our panel will be three active members of the media, James Campbell (Herald Sun/Sky News), Ramona Koval (writer, broadcaster and former ABC board member) and Elahn Zetlin (video producer, recently at the ABC).
Please join us.
BEHIND THE SCENES: HOW WE REPRESENT YOU
There is a lot of confusion in the community about all the different government working groups and taskforces that seem to have popped up to address antisemitism.
The JCCV currently participates in three of these groups:
- Glen Eira Social Cohesion Taskforce
- Department of Premier and Cabinet’s Local Escalation and Help (LEAH) group
- Premier’s Anti-Hate Taskforce
While these meetings take place behind closed doors, the JCCV is working to ensure we can share more of what is discussed during these meetings. We want you – our community – to know more about what is happening and what is being planned.
To this end, you can read the latest communique issued by the Department of Premier and Cabinet after the LEAH meeting late last month.
MASKED HATE HAS NO PLACE
Despite being promised by Premier Jacinta Allen in December last year, we are still yet to see laws introduced to Parliament banning face-coverings at protests.
The JCCV has called for an effective and comprehensive face covering ban, plus other laws that will assist police to try and reign in aggressive and hostile protesters, to be introduced immediately.
These reforms are urgently needed. We saw a group of neo-Nazis marching through the CBD behind masks, in darkness, too cowardly to show their faces.
This is a dangerous fringe, but one that cannot be allowed to grow. They will not intimidate us. They will not divide us.
LEARNING FOR LASTING IMPACT
This week, the JCCV ran three more Jewish Immersion Programs, including a particularly robust program for the senior leadership team at Jewish Care (around three-quarters of whom are not Jewish).
Participants at all the programs were engaged and conversation was sincere and free-flowing.
But don’t take my word for it, this is what one of the managers at an organisation where we ran a program left in her feedback form: “I have had more positive feedback about the session than any we have ever had, so you certainly made an impact” and staff had told her “what a difference it made to their understanding of Judaism and the experience of prejudice.”
