Religious communities eager to help
Faith communities also taking steps to harness people’s desire to help out
Organized religion often gets a bad rap. But as the Greater Montreal region scrambles to figure out how to accommodate the more than 6,000 Syrian refugees expected to arrive here over the next year, the “organized” nature of religion, it seems, is quite welcome.
Faith communities are taking concrete steps not only to meet the needs of refugees but to harness the strong desire of so many Montrealers to help out. The Montreal Gazette spoke to several local religious leaders this week about their efforts to sponsor and provide for Syrian families.
At the Dorval Mosque, for example, the initiative to sponsor refugees started more than two years ago as worshippers with family members in Syria approached mosque leaders for help. The mosque has raised over $100,000 so far, and intends to sponsor five families. The government requires sponsors to show they can provide at least $12,000 for each individual sponsored refugee, and $22,000 for a couple with three children, plus $1,531 per additional child. Since the mosque is currently working on sponsoring 33 people — one of the families includes 11 children — fundraising efforts continue.
The first family, a couple with three children, arrived in Montreal on Nov. 17, and the integration process seems to be going well, said Mehmet Deger, president of the Dorval Mosque.
“We found the father a job. We registered the kids for school, we furnished their apartment and now the mother has been offered a parttime job,” he said.
Deger is not surprised to see the family adapting well. This is not the first time the mosque has stepped in to help refugees. In the mid-1990s, the mosque sponsored 33 families from Bosnia, and he said they were all very motivated to become contributing members of the society that sheltered them in their time of need.
“Two of them are millionaires now. All of them work very hard. Their children all speak three languages; English, French and Bosnian. ... These immigrants, all of them are working. They don’t go on welfare.”
Raising the money for the Syrians has not been difficult, he said, and the mosque has done very little organized fundraising. People just give, he said.
“In our faith, we say if we save one person, we save all humanity. If we kill one person, we kill all humanity. In the sight of God, every human being is a miracle and very valuable.”
At the end of the interview, Deger seemed anxious to point out that it is not only the Muslim community that is contributing to the mosque’s efforts to help the refugees.
“Can you please, in your story, express our thanks to all the Dorval families who are helping?” asked Deger, before passing the phone to a woman who had just walked into the mosque to drop off some clothing and toys for the refugees.
“Everybody has heard the news and we are happy to try to make their landing here as comfortable as possible,” said Kate Doe, a Dorval resident who lives down the street from the mosque.
The Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Westmount is planning to sponsor two families, and possibly a third. For the first, the paperwork is complete and they are now waiting for the government to arrange transportation. The paperwork is still being gathered for the other families. The temple only began gathering funds for the project in early September and has already raised more than $70,000, said Senior Rabbi Lisa Grushcow.
“We have never raised money more easily. We’ve received small gifts and big gifts from inside and outside the community. The generosity has been humbling.”
Congregants were also quick to volunteer to help with providing food, housing, and social services, she said.
“We have people raring to go to help. There is a 13-year-old boy who has asked the guests to his bar mitzvah to bring school and art supplies to the service on Saturday morning. When we first announced we were doing this, we had people offering bedroom sets and cars. What we need is for someone to offer storage space for donations like that.”
She said religious institutions get a lot of criticism, some of it justified, but in times of crisis, they can be powerful tools in harnessing and organizing efforts that spring from a natural human urge to help those in need.
“If that instinct to help doesn’t get channelled quickly, it dissipates. How many heartbreaking things do we see in the newspaper? If we don’t see a concrete way to do something, we move on with our lives.” But if there is something concrete to do, people step up, she said.
The families the temple will be helping are Muslim. Grushcow said the religious affiliations of the refugees was never an issue.
“Something I’ve been adamant about is that the only relevance of religion (in this project) is what our religion teaches us to do, which is to help people.”
If the sponsorship does something for broader Muslim-Jewish relations in the city, that would be wonderful, she said, “because that is work that needs to be done, too, but the focus right now is really just on helping people who need help.”
At the Unitarian Church in NotreDame-de-Grâce, there has been talk of sponsoring Syrian refugees for a couple of years, but this summer, as disturbing images of Syrian refugees flooded the news, the congregation became more passionate about the project. A vote was taken on Nov. 22 to sponsor a family.
Minister Diane Rollert said some members of the congregation had an interesting debate on whether they should try to sponsor a family that other faith groups might not, such as one with same-sex parents or a family with no religious beliefs.
“In the end, we decided that vetting people on the basis of belief (or sexual orientation) is not something we are going to do. We will look at who is in need, because the situation is so dire, but we are open to all of these possibilities.”
There is a task force in place now, and lots of volunteers waiting for marching orders, she said.
The Unitarian Church has done this kind of humanitarian work in the past, she said, supplying funds to help a church member adopt a Vietnamese child, for example, or sponsoring a young man who had been a child soldier in Sierra Leone.
For now, the church has set aside sufficient funds to support only one family over the first year.
“We have a commitment to do it once, but my prayer and hope is that we will do it more than once. This is something we can do in the world. We are looking at all these people in need and we can see this crisis will not be over soon.”
Sponsoring refugees was not an expressed part of the church’s mission until recently, but Rollert said it fits in with Unitarian values.
“We are called to help nurture and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. These are people whose dignity and worth have been challenged in terrible ways. We have so much good fortune and abundance in this country, and if we can do something to help, it’s very powerful.”
We have so much good fortune and abundance in this country, and if we can do something to help, it’s very powerful.