By Julie Schonfeld
Modern-day slavery is a high-profit and low-risk endeavor that allows criminals, through their cruel enslavement of innocent people, to profit by $32 billion per year.
Last spring, The President's Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships on which I am honored to sit, issued a monumental report entitled, “Building Partnerships to Eradicate Modern-Day Slavery.” As we initiate a national call to action for the United States government to work with the American public -- NGOs, charitable organizations, business leaders, universities and other educational institutions, as well as the faith community -- to eradicate modern-day slavery, we are mindful that this is a heinous crime trapping an estimated 21 million people across the globe in servitude.
The magnitude of the problem can overwhelm us, and, once learning of the problem, we naturally want to feel like we can have a meaningful impact. Right now, one of the most important actions we can each take is to educate ourselves and to raise awareness in our own circles about the fact that slavery exists today. The rabbis of the Talmud when debating whether study or action are greater concluded that study is greater because it leads to action. Only when the magnitude of the problem is known throughout our society will the social will to change be found. A first step is to go to slaveryfootprint.org and learn about the presence of slave labor in the goods we use on a daily basis.
I hope you will read the report and share it with your communities. It contains ten recommendations including creating a single national hotline for human trafficking, and establishing the governmental entity that monitors and enforces laws against modern-day slavery as a bureau of the Federal government. The report also calls upon faith and community leaders to educate and work together in order to help curb the demand for commercial sex that is trapping innocent people in lives of unspeakable cruelty, both in the United States and around the world. The Council also made recommendations that look at how government and law enforcement can work more effectively together to provide more effective and expansive victims' services.
But the release of this report is but the first step.
As a rabbi, I recognize that the Jewish community has an abiding obligation to fulfill our moral mandate to emulate the Godly qualities described in the Bible -- where God "saw our suffering and brought us out of Egypt with an outstretched arm." The Jewish community joins Americans of all faiths in acting upon our belief that human beings are inherently free and may never be viewed as property, much less subject to the horrors of labor and sexual exploitation.
Our communities are a powerful moral voice, we need to work as advocates to bring an end to modern-day slavery in order to successfully combat this horror which is exacerbated by rampant poverty, and preys on those in crisis.
The voices of courageous survivors of human trafficking and the efforts of the many non-governmental organizations dedicated to ending this crime too often go unheard and it is noteworthy that the Jewish community is embracing this issue. As faith and community leaders, we are compelled to come together to raise up a unified moral voice to mobilize the public to join us in our opposition to modern-day slavery. Just as the White House has pledged to use its unique role as leader and convener to mobilize even larger numbers of people, we can leverage our voice as a Jewish community to bring the struggle against modern-day slavery to the scale it demands.