Dear Friends,
Jeremy Borovitz is a remarkable young man. In 2009 he received his BAR from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He then joined the Peace Corp and was sent to a small town in the Ukraine, where he taught English, music, ecology, as well as Jewish history and culture. He founded the Jewish Heritage Council of Peace Corps, to develop Jewish themed lesson plans and projects for Peace Corps volunteers and to create a community for the celebration of Jewish holidays. He then went on to become a Jewish Service Corp Fellow for the Joint Distribution Committee in the Ukraine, researching local Jewish history in Ukrainian villages with local students and organizing local festivals of Jewish Culture. He also engaged young adults in the Kiev community through conducting Shabbat dinners and teaching classes about Judaism. Jeremy recently went to Israel to begin a program of Jewish study there.
This plea on behalf of the protesters in the Ukraine, written on January 12th was sent to me by his father, a friend and mentor of mine, Rabbi Neal Borovitz. I was very moved by this letter. Please take a moment to read it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Jordan
It was exactly four years ago this month when I first got that big white envelope in the mail, informing me that I was to spend the next 2 and a half years of my life as a Youth Development Volunteer in Ukraine. I was excited, and nervous, and scared, and shocked that I had actually followed through on my threats to join the Peace Corps.
Over the next three and a half years (I decided to stay a bit longer) I grew to love this beautiful, complicated, and at times harsh country. The winters made me freeze and the bureaucracy drove me insane. But the people whom I met and worked with were, for the most part, strong, brave, and prideful.
And last week, their government sold their rights down the river. The Senate waved at the raft as it floated by.
When protests broke out in late November against the government’s decision to not sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, I couldn’t pull myself away from my computer. My deep concern for my friends who were shivering on Independence Square, and the very real violence some of them faced, encouraged me to change an already scheduled international flight for the sake of a pit stop in Kiev.
It was a wild few days. Trying to get a sense of what was happening, I spent my days wandering around the protest with my friends, talking to as many people as I could. They were all friendly, of course, and upon hearing my thick American accent when I spoke Ukrainian, their congeniality took on a pleading tone. One man nearly fell at my feet, regaling me with a terrible tale of the government stealing his business and his livelihood because he refused to pay the bribes they were demanding. Tell them, he begged me. Tell Obama what is happening here, beg him to help us.
The protests have often been characterized in the Western press as a desire for Ukraine to move closer to Europe and away from Russia. This is only a part of the story. These people are standing on the square because they are tired of having a government who works against them. Corruption has been so ingrained in their culture that many public service professionals, including police, doctors, and teachers, often expect bribes to simply do their jobs. For a country rich in natural resources, its soil is getting sucked dry by a wealthy and powerful few. The Social safety net designed to aid its weakest citizens is riddled with holes, and it becomes nearly impossible to not fall through the cracks.
So when the people took a stand on that square, the government raised its night stick and began swinging wildly into the night. People were beaten indiscriminately, others thrown in jail, and yet they kept showing up, night after night, Sunday after Sunday, to stand with their fellow citizens, to protest this time warp back to Soviet-style politics where the political discourse is conducted with blood and handcuffs.
And on Thursday, in one of the greatest shams from a government that has aced the art of feigning democracy and justice, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada passed a law that strips away the rights not only of those citizens standing on the square but of its people as a whole. Suddenly NGOs who receive overseas charitable work will be considered foreign agents. Journalists who print things unfavorable to the regime will be given years in prison. And one can be convicted of a crime without ever showing up for their day in court. Vladimir Putin must be gleaming with pride at all the tyranny his money has bought him.
I received my letter in the mail four years ago, but this story began a year before that, when my father and I drove down to Washington, D.C. on a cold Tuesday and stood outside on the freezing grass to watch as Barack Obama was inaugurated as our 44th President of the United States. And as he stood up there I believed his vision of a better tomorrow, I realized I wanted to do something to help my country, to serve in my own way. A few days later, I had applied to the Peace Corps.
In that first white envelope, on a small pamphlet that might have easily been discarded, was a statement of the three goals of the Peace Corps, the aims which were to be my mantra for the duration of my service.
Goal One: To help the people of your host country, to provide support, to install internet in a small village so the students can follow the protests in their country without media bias, to teach English to a young University student so he can give interviews to foreign reporters who come visit him on the square, to strengthen the organizational capacity of a Human Rights NGO so that they can stand by their countrymen as their constitution is burned before their eyes.
Goal Two: To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served, to tell them of the wonderful country I came from and the values we stand for, to regale them with tales of inaugurations and marches and hope and change that we still hold on to even if it never quite comes as we’d imagined, to teach them to dream in a culture that suppresses it, to teach them to believe in a tomorrow they can’t yet see.
Goal Three: To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans, to tell everyone I know that there is a country called Ukraine that is not Russia, filled with people who yearn to create a real democracy, to post on facebook and to write to Senators and to scream at the top of my lungs until the world takes notice that these people still exist and are still standing and we seem blase to their cause, to implore for action from my government, to insist that they send these bandits a message that such tactics will not fly, not on our watch.
Help me to fulfill the three goals, because otherwise, I would have been better off to never open my letter.
Jeremy Borovitz
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