ANNUAL REPORT: 5764

Dear Friends,

For the spiritual depth and the moral courage you-all have shown in facing the disastrous public policies and our inner discouragements of the past year, we owe you - our members, readers, contributors, and friends - our deepest thanks.

For during this past year, The Shalom Center and all of us faced a corporate-governmental amalgam that rejected all action to reduce global scorching, in the teeth of all scientific evidence and in defiance of the Covenant between God, humanity, and all that breathes upon the earth;

continued a bloody war that had no justification in either real US interests or international law or moral teachings about peace and war;

twisted the great upsurge of loving marriage in communities where marriage had been prevented — between gay partners — into an occasion to whip up political support and damage human rights;

turned upside down the biblical teaching to redistribute wealth in the sabbatical and Jubilee years, into a vast tax giveaway to the richest people in our society;

encouraged and condoned the use of torture by US troops, and imprisoned captives, immigrants, and US citizens for years, without recourse to any legal remedy or connection to their families.

So all of us had to draw upon our spiritual roots to stand up against these perversions of American ethics and religious wisdom.

We will have to keep on doing that.

So we at The Shalom Center have been reinventing ourselves to meet these deeper challenges.

We have looked beyond the issues of war, environmental disaster, and political corruption to the issue of Power: What and Who are the Pharaohs and Caesars of our generation?

We have begun organizing efforts to go Beyond Oil since Oil is one of the key causes of war, environmental degradation, and corruption into a world that uses energy that is not destroying us.

We have made our Shalom Report and Website more effective, more colorful ways of reaching out.

We have brought together Muslims, Jews, and Christians to explore how the Abrahamic communities can work together for peace and healing, rather than dragging the world into war and terror.

We have looked at all of this as a spiritual, not merely a political or material, question. We have put our energy into new forms of prayer and new ways of learning from the Bible and other sacred texts, as well as into new shapes for political and economic life.

What we have said for years is now apparent to nearly everyone: Absent religious renewal, there will be religious retrogression.

Thanks to all of you, we still can share with you the open, vulnerable, leafy, leaky sukkah the open, leafy, leaky hut that is the home of peace.

Thanks to all of you, we still can light in these dark years the candle-glow that shows the way ahead.

With blessings of shalom,

Arthur

********************************************************

STAFF PROFILES

Goodbye, Mia! Mia Cohen was our Program Director until November 2003. She is currently coordinating an intentional community at Elat Chayyim.

Welcome:

Emily Nepon, Program Director. enepon@shalomctr.org
Emily joined the staff in 11/2003, bringing much experience in nonprofits including her work for six years as Founding Director of the Self-Education Foundation (http://www.selfeducation.org), as well as experience as staff of Prisoner Visitation and Support, board member of New Society Educational Foundation and Resource Generation, and fundraising coordinator for the 2000 RNC-protestors' legal support. Outside of work, Emily dedicates time to raising money for groups like ACT UP Philly, and trying to build an LGBT movement for racial and economic justice.

Charles Lenchner, National Organizer. clenchner@shalomctr.org
Charles joins us just having finished a year working on the Dennis Kucinich for President Campaign. Previously, he was executive director of Am-Kolel, a Jewish Renewal community in Rockville, MD. He has worked professionally with a variety of social change and peace organizations, including Friends of the Earth Middle East, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and Progressive Democrats of America.

MISSION STATEMENT THE SHALOM CENTER:
A Prophetic Voice in Jewish, Multireligious, and American Life

We draw on the spiritual wisdom of Jewish and other traditions to challenge the pharaohs of our generation unaccountable corporate and governmental power and our own blind habits, overwork, arrogance, and envy to seek peace, justice, compassion, and healing of the earth.

ACHIEVEMENTS
We've enjoyed a year full of organizing, teaching, learning, and bringing-together.

International Connection
Arthur has traveled around the world this year: attending a conference on Religion, Power and Violence held by the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, engaging in a joint board meeting of Rabbis for Human Rights (Israel and North America chapters) in Israel and Palestine, teaching about Jewish Renewal in Spain, and leading Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services with Rabbi Phyllis Berman in Beijing, China.

Multi-Religious Organizing
We've organized multi-religious gatherings and joint statements both locally and internationally.

In memory of the third anniversary of September 11, we coalesced an "Abrahamic Retreat," a bringing together of Muslims, Jews, and Christians for four-day retreat in New York state.

In international news, Arthur spoke on Arabic-language TV as one of four leading American clergyfolk of four traditions, condemning use of torture by US military as sinful and systemic. This event was covered by world and US press. Check out this TV spot at http://www.faithfulamerica.org/adclip.htm .

This moment became the seed of a longer-term effort. When the Preasident appointed as Attornney general the White Hoiuse lawyer who had justified annulling the Geneva Conventions and authorizing the use of torture, we worked closely with Christians and Muslims to create a multireligious challenge to the appointrment.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee begins to hold hearings on the nomination, this Open Letter to Alberto Gonzales has more than 200 signatures.

We have also worked closely with Win Without War and the National Council of Churches to make torture an important public issue.

In Philadelphia, we initiated a letter from 21 rabbis to Senator Arlen Specter about the Gonzales nomination, since Specter is from Philadelphia and will chair the Judiciary Committee. Eight of the rabbis hand-delivered the letter to the Senator and met with him for an hour.

Locally, we've also been a coordinating energy in what has become the Philadelphia Area Interfaith Peace Network. We've worked with local progressive faith communities, and secular allies, to create a series of powerful events bringing together diverse communities and making connections between local and international issues of peace, justice, and faith.

Our April 4th observance wove together a new Passover Freedom Seder, Palm Sunday, and Dr. Martin Luther King's teachings about Racism, Militarism, & Materialism to challenge the concentration of unaccountable power in the Bush Administration's effort to achieve a global US empire and in global corporations. This event was co-sponsored by 35 multi-religious and secular social justice groups that brought together a group diverse in age, class, race, and faith-background.

For this event, we created and published a New Freedom Seder, which we distributed free to all attendees of the Philly event. Over 100 people around the country purchased copies of this new compilation for use in their homes and congregations. What a powerful way to celebrate the 36th anniversary of Rabbi Waskow's 1968 Freedom Seder, written in response to the assassination of MLK, Jr.

We are currently coordinating and raising money to publish a multireligious statement: The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah, by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, on peacemaking in Iraq and in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Progressive Jewish Organizing
In Spring of this year we organized a consultation in Philadelphia of twenty progressive Jewish activists from across USA to explore Jewish action on global issues of militarism and corporate control. Shalom Center staff attended the Seeking Peace, Pursuing Justice, Healing the Earth -Jewish Student Global Justice Conference at NYU's Bronfman Center, organized a Havdalah service at an RNC-protest interfaith peace gathering, and represented The Shalom Center as co-sponsors of a progressive-Jewish gathering at Workmen's Circle during the RNC.

Speaking and teaching moments
Those of you who read our email-newsletters may remember the powerful story of Arthur's opportunity to speak directly and publicly, with polite but pointed critique of Israeli policy, to the Israeli ambassador to the US at a function held at the embassy in Washington. He was also able to speak in the same manner, with polite but pointed critique of US policy, to the US ambassador to Israel at a function held in Jerusalem. The year has been ripe with opportunity to "speak truth to power!"

There has also been ample opportunity for teaching and learning among friends, including Arthur's Keynote at the National Convention of Brit Tzedek in Boston, and another Keynote speech on the topic of Jubilee at a Conference of the Religious Working Group on the IMF/World Bank.

A really fun event brought together Arthur, the Rev Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and the founder of Burning Man for a panel discussion called "The Rabbi, the Reverend and the Renegade" at 14th St Y in Manhattan.

A few of the many exciting teaching moments Arthur has enjoyed this year:

- at Elat Chayyim, Arthur taught a class called "35, 70 and Beyond: Shaping our Lives and Telling Our Stories in Healing the World."
- at the United Jewish Communities (UJC) Young Leadership Conference, a workshop on Passover Seders as Political Act.
- at the final night of the Hazon Bike Ride, on Pharaoh and the Earth
- Arthur spoke at the founding convention of the Clergy Leadership Network and became a member of the Steering Committee.

New Technology
This year, The Shalom Center started to utilize Online Grassroots Action technology. We have already mobilized over 5000 emails and letters to Congress, the White House, and to local, national and Jewish Letters to the Editor (we added a Jewish Press option to the program which is used by thousands of other groups as well) on issues ranging from environmental policy to opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment to the war in Iraq or events in Israel/Palestine. Thank you all for your active participation!

THE MENORAH AWARDS
This Hanukkah, The Shalom Center presented Seymour Hersh, Ruth Messinger, and Peter Yarrow with Menorah Awards: Bringing New Light into Dark Places.

Sy Hersh is one of the worlds great investigative reporters. He wrote the crucial New Yorker stories that penetrated the claims that only a few soldiers had been the perpetrators of torture in Iraq, and a generation ago he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Ruth Messinger is president of the American Jewish World Service and a former borough president of Manhattan. AJWS supports transformative work in relief and reconstruction of shattered regions of the world. She was the first senior leader of the mainstream Jewish community to speak out against the Iraq war, before the US invasion of Iraq.

Where Hersh has brought the light of truth into dark places of shame and deceit, Messinger has brought the light of compassion into the dark places of despair around the world.

Peter Yarrow emceed the event, and was also honored for his many years of peacemaking. For the past few years, he has focused on the pioneering work of Operation Respect, which helps build a culture of tolerance and respect in schools and classrooms.

FUTURE FOCUS
The Shalom Center will be spending the next year focusing on two separate but very related projects.

One the one hand, the work of building on the potential of the Abrahamic tradition to promote deep sharing and peacemaking will continue. In particular, we hope to inspire activities that take advangate of the confluence of dates this coming September. The busy Jewish month of Tishrei coinides with the Muslim month of Ramadan. This full and holy time period including also the Christian commemoration of St. Francis of Assisi opens the door to new linkages within our traditions.

One the other, we are continuing our Beyond Oil campaign. Recently, a number of new books and magazine articles have come out addressing the rapidly approaching peak oil moment known as Hubberts Peak. That moment, which can only by pinpointed in the past tense, will be (or has been) a turning point on our civilizations relationship with fossil fuels. Will we work together peacefully to create a new energy future, or will America use violence to lay claim to the last dregs of recoverable oil, with which to fuel our wasteful lifestyle? This dilemma is at the heart of the apparent conflict between Islam and the United States. Our work will manifest in Philadelphia, as we work with others to model the kinds of multifaith responses best able to challenge status quo, and nationally, as we articulate in religious terms what a Jewish and multifaith response might look like.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF GRANTS
Grants from Tides Foundation and Bread and Roses Fund for the New Freedom Seder, Shefa Fund for online advocacy work, and Christiane Northrup Foundation for the Tent of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah Campaign. Also, for general support: the Rita Poretsky Foundation, Levinson Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Fern and Joel Levin Philanthropic Fund, and The Mordechai Liebling and Lynne Iser Tzedakah Fund of The Shefa Fund.

Shalom Center/ ALEPH
Profit and Loss
October 2003 through September 2004

Income
Contributions / Donations 34481
Grants 26301
Interest Income 48
Restricted: Tent of Abr. Ad 12000
Restricted: Free Time 60
Restricted: Peace 1324
Restricted: Abraham Retreat 9000
Sales: TakeBackTime books 254
Total Income 83468

Expense
Abrahamic Retreat 3437
Bank Charges 40
Books / Magazines 942
Bulk Mail Other 451
Consultant/Tech Expense 1734
Donations/Discr. Funds 630
Dues / Subscription 5235
Eqmt Purchase 3650
Health Insurance 2839
Meals / Meetings 524
Misc Exp 954
Office Expenses / Supplies 1801
Overhead to ALEPH 6756
Payroll Expense 20799
Payroll Tax Expenses 2653
Peace programming 3744
Postage 1191
Printing 322
Seminars / Conferences 580
Telephone & Internet 2700
Travel Expenses 7354
Utilities 446
Total Expense 68782

Net Income 14696