Project Dignity helps repair the world for refugees in Australia

A community initiative inspired by a rabbi's sermon is feeding, housing and helping to heal vulnerable asylum seekers.

On Yom Kippur 2016, the Temple Beth Israel rabbi delivered a sermon about living the Jewish values of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and kavod ha’briyot (the recognition of human dignity).

While many would have let the words go in one ear and out the other, a group of the synagogue’s women members decided to step out of their comfort zone.

They formed Project Dignity on the basis that “looking at the injustices of history through a Jewish lens alone will not repair the world or make it a safe place”.

Co-coordinator Nicole Brown says Project Dignity’s original vision was to “gain a deeper understanding of the difficult and uncertain lives of refugees and how we, as a community, can play a role in supporting them”.

From its early days, Project Dignity committee member Dr Karen Dunwoodie, from Deakin University’s Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy Training and Education (CREATE), partnered with Major Karen Elkington, at the Salvation Army’s Asylum Seeker and Refugee Service, to connect the group with students who had arrived in Australia by boat as unaccompanied minors.

Co-convenor Elly Brooks, who joined Project Dignity in 2018, tells the story of one such boy, Ali (not his real name) whose mother put him on a boat to Australia from Afghanistan when he was just 12 years old.

“The family were Hazara background, so they were being persecuted,” says Brooks, whose mother was a Holocaust survivor.

Ali is now at university on a scholarship, after starting his life in Australia in a detention centre. Asylum seeker students aren’t eligible for government subsidies or HECS, and can’t afford international student fees, so they rely on scholarships to enter university.