Rescue workers in Santiago cope with the aftermath of the earthquake that rocked Chile pn Feb. 27. Juan Eduardo Donoso/Creative Commons

As U.S. Jewish organizations ponder how to respond to the massive quake that rocked Chile, they report that the infrastructure of the country’s Jewish community suffered little damage.

Chile and its capital, Santiago, while badly damaged, experienced less structural damage and significantly fewer deaths in Saturday’s earthquake than did Haiti and its capital, Port-au-Prince, in January, even though the quake in Chile was much more powerful. The death toll in Chile reportedly stands at more than 700, with some coastal towns having been wiped out by the earthquake and a subsequent tsunami.

Early reports indicated that the Jewish community in Chile suffered minimal damage. Unlike Haiti, Chile has a recognizable Jewish community of about 16,000, centered mostly in Santiago.

Chabad-Lubavitch, which has an outpost in Santiago, saw some structural damage to its building, but the organization wrote on its Website that the Jewish “communities bordering the Pacific Ocean emerged largely unscathed after one of the largest earthquakes on record sent buildings and bridges crashing down to their foundations throughout the South American country of Chile.”

Similarly, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on Monday said it had no reports of significant damage to the Jewish communal infrastructure in Chile.

The JDC has opened a mailbox to collect money for the relief effort, and says it will work with the Chilean community to direct the assistance.

“We are waiting,” a JDC spokesman said. “In terms of Santiago, there was minimal structural damage to institutions. It is a very strong, self-sufficient community.”

Similarly World ORT, which runs two vocational schools in Chile, reported that damage to the Jewish community appeared to be minimal.

“Lights are still off in 60 percent of the city, public transportation is suspended, and the government has requested everyone to remain at home if possible,” Marcelo Lewkow, the national director of ORT Chile, wrote in a report the organization circulated through its newsletter.

Lewkow added, however, that the Chilean Jewish community “to my knowledge [has] not suffered any losses or casualties. Synagogues and schools are OK, pending a deeper evaluation by professionals, but there is no visible damage to the buildings or hydraulic systems.”

The American Jewish World Service, which has played a prominent role in the relief effort in Haiti, is not planning on setting up operations in Chile. AJWS is directing its supporters to www.alertnet.org and to MercyCorps.

Unlike in Haiti, one of the world’s poorest countries — the AJWS had been working there with a dozen development organizations on the ground prior to the quake — AJWS was not involved in any work in Chile, which is wealthier and much better developed.

“Of the groups we know that are working on the ground, the one we know that has a network of connections was Mercy Corps,” AJWS President Ruth Messinger told JTA.

On Monday, it was unclear if the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief was going to set up a mailbox, but it was set to convene soon to discuss the earthquake, a JDC official said. The JDC operates the relief organization.

The world also seems to have been a bit slower to react in Chile, as the South American nation has the public infrastructure to carry out much of its own rescue effort.

Israel is in contact with its ambassador in Chile, Ynet reported, and the government sent its condolences in a statement. Israel was among the first countries to help in Haiti.

There were no Israelis among the dead in Chile, according to the Israeli government.

“Israel stands by the Chilean government and people and wishes to send its condolences to the victims’ families and offer its support to the residents at this trying time,” the Israeli statement read, according to Ynet.

JTA

Pakistan has been devastated by massive floods. Peter Biro/International Rescue Committee

Nearly a month after pictures of Pakistanis wading through floodwaters began to appear on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, aid from Americans, including Jews, is beginning to arrive in the stricken country.

American Jews are now responding to the call to bring relief to the devastated area, where conditions have been growing steadily worse. The monsoon rains that flooded Pakistan’s northwest region about a month ago have killed more than 1,000 people, and millions more are estimated to have been left homeless. Roads and railways have been damaged, along with schools and other civic infrastructure. The impact on the country’s crops is still being calculated and could run into the billions of dollars.

The American Jewish World Service and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee each put out an appeal for donations last week.

The AJWS, which has been working with grassroots organizations in Pakistan for years and had raised $42,000 for the Pakistan effort by the end of last week, is delivering aid bags with food, water, pots, pans, and clothes to families in the region. JDC also has worked with Pakistan before — it responded to earthquakes that hit the region in 2005 and 2008 — and the organization has allocated $20,000 from its revolving disaster relief fund that it plans to use to distribute medicine and other supplies. It hasn’t yet raised enough to cover that amount, but officials hope to meet or exceed the goal as their campaign progresses.

“Checks take time to come in,” said Will Recant, assistant executive vice president in charge of international development at JDC. “Not everything is done electronically, and a lot of what we do is done through federations.”

The American Jewish Committee contributed an undisclosed amount from its humanitarian fund to the JDC effort, and a spokesman for the group said it is encouraging donors to give to JDC directly.

In light of the dire situation, Pakistanis likely wouldn’t object to receiving aid from the United States, wrote Aoun Sahi, a journalist in Lahore, Pakistan, via e-mail. “But there will be some problems with the word ‘Jewish’ if printed on clothing especially,” he wrote. “It will not be easy for them to accept aid from Jewish groups from Israel, but they will be OK with American Jewish groups’ aid.”

He added, “I think this is a good opportunity for different Jewish groups to establish links with some Pakistani groups.”

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles said she knows of no aid that has gone from Israel to Pakistan during this crisis. Israel was widely applauded for its rapid response in providing aid and medical services in Haiti after the earthquake.

Though the Pakistani floods have been news for weeks, Jewish groups issued their call for donations only last week.

How much and how fast people donate can depend heavily on media coverage of a disaster.

“The biggest challenge right now is that this has been going on for two weeks, and the media is just now starting to pay attention,” AJWS spokesman Joshua Berkman said, adding that coverage of Pakistan’s floods has paled in comparison with the attention immediately given to the Haitian earthquake.

Larger, nonsectarian U.S. aid organizations are also reporting a slow response to the Pakistani flooding.

“Haiti is the obvious comparison. This response is far slower,” said Susan Kotcher, vice president for development at the International Rescue Committee. Kotcher said the IRC, which made its first calls to donors on July 29, is now getting hundreds of daily donations for Pakistan and has raised a total of $1.4 million from Americans. By contrast, in the first few days after the earthquake in Haiti, the group was getting thousands of donations each day, and raised more than $4 million in the first two weeks.

Some, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have attributed the slow response to the economic hardships facing Americans, as well as to a feeling of fatigue among donors who have contributed to other recent relief efforts. Others say the slow response may be caused by the fact that the devastation from floods, unlike that from earthquakes and tsunamis, develops over time.

“Its destructive power will accumulate and grow with time,” said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

But others suspect that political factors are at play. “I can’t help but have my suspicions,” said Edina Lekovic, communications director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “The first media coverage that I saw about the floods had more to do with whether the victims were going to rely on extremist groups for aid and relief,” she said, referring to news stories reporting that Islamic charities with connections to terrorist groups were distributing aid to people in flood-affected areas. “That their basic humanity and suffering comes second to questionable aid sources is insulting, and misses the point.”

The slowness of the global response is also being noticed in Pakistan. “Many right-wing organizations have been raising their voices over the slow response of Americans to the disaster,” Sahi said. “Many of them have been comparing the response of Americans to the Pakistani tragedy with the one faced by Haiti, and have been trying to make it a religious issue.”

Asked what might account for the slowness of the Jewish response, Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif. said, “I don’t think that is an anti-Muslim deal. I think it’s a deeper question of overload” — too many issues to care about at once. American Jews are more concerned with existential threats being made against them by Iran, he suggested.

“If I’m scared that somebody is threatening me, I’m not going to listen to the cries of the neighbors,” Schulweis said. “That’s too bad,” he added, “because in the course of that parochialism, we lose one of the most uplifting values in Judaism itself, which is to be a light unto the nations.”

To help support the relief efforts in Pakistan, visit the websites of the JDC (jdc.org), the AJWS (ajws.org) or the IRC (theirc.org).

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

An aerial view of debris from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. Alexander Tidd/U.S. Navy

Almost as soon as the catastrophe in Japan began unfolding last Friday, Jewish groups scrambled to figure out how to get help to the area.

In Israel, search-and-rescue organizations like ZAKA and IsraAid readied teams to head to the Japanese devastation zone. In Tokyo, the Chabad center took an accounting of local Jews and began organizing a shipment of aid to stricken cities to the north. In the United States, aid organizations ranging from B’nai B’rith International to local and national federation agencies launched campaigns to collect money for rescue, relief, and rebuilding efforts in the Pacific.

But then Shabbat came, and with it the news that a suspected Palestinian terrorist had brutally murdered five family members in the Jewish west bank settlement of Itamar, and the focus of the Jewish community seemed to shift.

“Not sure who to think about first,” Nadia Levene, a British-Israeli event-planner living in Jerusalem, wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. “The devastated remaining members of the Fogel family from Itamar, Gilad Shalit — five years in Hamas captivity — or the survivors of the Japanese tragedy and the dangers they may be facing.”

The Orthodox Union, which sent out a message last Friday calling on supporters to donate to the organization’s newly established earthquake emergency fund, sent out another urgent message two days later calling on donors to give money to the OU’s victims of terrorism fund.

As of late Monday, the totals collected by each fund were running neck and neck, the OU’s chief operating officer, David Frankel, told JTA.

“We have an obligation to care for our own,” Frankel said, “but the enormity of the tragedy that happened in Japan is so extraordinary that for the Jewish community not to have an outpouring of support would not only be a denial of one of our primary obligations to care for everyone in their time of need,” he said, but also a missed opportunity to honor the memory of Chiune Sugihara — the Japanese consul general to Lithuania who in 1940 helped save at least 6,000 Lithuanian Jews from the hands of the Nazis by getting them transit visas to Japan.

“The Japanese community helped us in our time of need; this is our way to help them in their time of need,” Frankel said. “We can never repay the debt, but this is the right thing to do.”

By Tuesday, Israeli teams composed of rescue personnel, emergency medical officers, and water pollution specialists had reached the suburbs of Tokyo, and they were in contact with aid workers in the northern part of the country where the tsunami hit hardest, according to Shachar Zahavi, chairman of IsraAid.

Several American Jewish organizations, including the Jewish federation in Chicago and the American Jewish Committee, are funneling money to IsraAid for disaster relief in Japan.

In Tokyo, the Chabad center commissioned a bakery in Sendai, one of the cities battered by the tsunami, to bake bread for its residents and surrounding areas. The center also trucked several tons of food and supplies to Sendai, Chabad officials said. The officials estimated that Chabad’s relief in Japan is costing approximately $25,000 per day.

In the United States, Jewish humanitarian organizations reported that the money was coming in fast for mailboxes set up to receive donations for Japanese disaster relief.

“We are determined to provide emergency relief as quickly as possible and to work with our partners to provide support over the longer term as well,” said Fred Zimmerman, chairman of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Emergency Committee.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the main overseas partner for the Jewish Federations, said it had collected more than $400,000 by midday Tuesday.

What makes the Japanese situation a unique challenge for Jewish humanitarian organizations is the absence of relationships in a country that traditionally has been an aid donor, not a recipient.

Indeed, when the American Jewish World Service, which led the Jewish aid response to the 2004 Asian tsunami, was asked what its aid effort would be for Japan, the answer was none at all because AJWS has no partners in the country, spokesman Joshua Berkman told JTA.

The JDC found itself in a similar situation.

“We had no programs in Japan prior to the earthquake; we just worked with the local Jewish community,” said Will Recant, an assistant executive vice president at JDC.

But almost immediately after the earthquake and tsunami hit, the JDC consulted with the Jewish community in Tokyo to identify local Japanese nongovernmental organizations working in the affected areas. By Tuesday, JDC had begun funneling money to JEN, a Tokyo-based organization specializing in shelter reconstruction, support of the socially vulnerable, and emergency supply distribution that had managed to send personnel to the ravaged Japanese prefectures of Miyagi and Fukushima.

As with other disasters, Recant said JDC will stick around to help with long-term relief, budget allowing. Only money raised specifically for Japan will be spent on disaster relief. There is no money in JDC’s budget for additional nonsectarian, humanitarian work, Recant said.

While Japan continues to reel from the triple disaster of an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, a massive tsunami, and a subsequent nuclear crisis, experts in Israel are trying to figure out what lessons from Japan can be applied to the Jewish state, which lies on two fault lines, the Carmel fault and the Dead Sea fault.

Israel experiences tremors every so often, but the last time a ruinous earthquake struck the area was in 1927, when the west bank city of Nablus suffered serious damage. An 1837 earthquake destroyed much of the northern Israeli cities of Safed and Tiberias and left thousands dead.

Israeli building codes have been updated for better earthquake safety compliance, but regulations and enforcement still are said to lag behind places like California, which experiences larger and more frequent quakes.

“There’s still a lot that has to be done as far as building codes are concerned,” said Michael Lazar, a tectonics expert at the University of Haifa. “There’s an attempt to encourage people to renovate older buildings and make them earthquake-ready, but it really hasn’t caught on.”

A scenario in which Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev, would face the kind of meltdown scenario situation that Japan is seeing now is much less likely, Lazar said, because Dimona is far from the tectonic lines that cross Israel.

“But,” he cautioned, “it’s hard to tell how an earthquake would disperse.”

UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey has opened an emergency relief fund to provide aid and support to the victims of the Japanese earthquake and ensuing tsunami and to help those in other potential disaster zones such as Hawaii and the U.S. mainland’s West Coast. To make a donation, go to http://www.ujannj.org.

Also visit .

JTA Wire Service

The Jewish Standard contributed to this report.

Jewish life is thriving in the countries of the former Soviet Union, according to Amos Lev-Ran of the American Jewish Distribution Committee.

“After 70 years of repression, the rebirth of Jewish life is nothing short of miraculous,” said Lev-Ran, JDC regional specialist for the former Soviet Union, on Monday before the meeting of the Overseas Allocation Committee of UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey, a major JDC funder.

But Lev-Ran also told the group that while much has been achieved in the region, many elderly Jews suffer in isolation and poverty, and they and others yearn to connect with their Jewish heritage.

As Lev-Ran explained it, the role of the JDC is to step in with funds and other assistance to enable communities to help themselves. That is don e through the creation of JCCs, Hillel student centers, young leadership programs, and family retreats.

Lev-Ran’s comments came in his introduction of Masha Aryeva, the director of the JCC in St. Petersburg, who detailed the varied role of her organization. While Russia has seen the rise of the very rich, and even a middle class living well, there are still the elderly and infirm who live on a subsistence level, shut-ins leading lonely lives.

The collapse of the Soviet Union opened many doors, but along with that came the collapse of the pension system, leaving many elderly destitute. For those, JDC aid is a lifeline.

“The only hope they have is chesed from the JDC,” said Aryeva. Even in a thriving city like St. Petersburg, there are elderly people unable to leave their apartments, she said. Nobody in Russia will help them, and that’s where the JDC steps in, she said.

There are some 165,000 needy Jewish elderly in the former Soviet Union, said Lev-Ran, with assistance coming from 2,600 JDC locations.

The role of the JDC is two-fold, Lev-Ran explained. There is a “hunger and a thirst” in the Jewish world of the FSU, he said. The hunger is for physical needs, such as food and medical care. Then there is a thirst for knowledge about Judaism, and a connection to the religion and tradition.

Lev-Ran displayed a document, written by a rabbi in 1952, meant as a testament to earlier Jewish life. The rabbi saw the destruction of religion in the Stalin years as the “end of Jewish life as we know it,” said Lev-Ran.

The rabbi was mistaken, Lev-Ran said, and years later, in 1980s, it was the Soviet Union that unraveled and religious life, for Jews and others, was rekindled.

Lev-Ran recounted a visit to an elderly woman in Odessa, in Ukraine. Nellie, now 76, lives on a pension of $71 a month, and she hadn’t been out of her apartment for seven years.

“There is no social safety net” for people like Nellie, infirm, who may live in a multi-story walkup, and whose only help comes from the JDC chesed system, he said, which relies on some 14,000 volunteers, some of them elderly themselves.

“As chesed succeeds in prolonging life,” Lev-Ran said, “the cost per client increases.”

Besides the elderly, JDC programs serve some 30,000 at-risk children with food and medical, social, and psychological support.

Modern JCCs have been established in Moscow, Odessa, Kharkov and Kishinev, but in her address Aryeva focused on the JCC in St. Petersburg, where she said some 100,000 Jews live.

She said that some 20 years ago, when she was in school, “I shouldn’t say I was Jewish.” Then, in 2005, the JCC was built, with a huge sign announcing its presence.

“Our goal is to open the doors to any Jewish person in St. Petersburg,” she said. “What we build I hope will be there forever.”

The services provided by the JCC in St. Petersburg sound strikingly familiar to American ears. There is a gym and a swimming pool for the body, Hebrew and Yiddish lessons for the mind, and holiday celebrations for the soul drawing some 600 attendees, she said.

While most of the programs are low-cost, a new middle class is able to afford more expensive services, such as a preschool that costs $1,000 a month, Aryeva said. Revenue received enables the JCC to support other programs.

Lev-Ran said a Jewish population of some three million had fallen to about a million because of emigration, and Aryeva said that those remaining are there to stay. “Those who wanted to leave left,” she said.

Many are not religious and don’t necessarily want to go to Israel, but they do want to connect with their Jewish roots, she said.

Lev-Ran reminded the group that despite the improvement of life for Jews in the FSU, many people in the smaller towns and regions need continued support, and there is an ongoing need for funds. With that thought, committee volunteers manned the phones for a telethon.