By Diana Brement ,
JTNews Columnist
Marvin Stern is the new executive director of Washington Appleseed, a non-partisan, non-profit public interest law center that works to identify and address injustices in the community through education, legal advocacy, community activism and policy expertise.
The Seattle native says the work dovetails nicely with his longstanding commitment to social justice.
“I’ve always felt I was a broker between ideas, resources and implementation,” Marvin says. “This is an ideal place for me to do that work.”
The organization does obvious things like linking pro bono legal services with those who need them, but also less obvious things like trying to improve low income families’ and individuals’ access to mainstream banking services so they can stop spending huge amounts on check cashing.
Also, “we want to look at the mortgage problem like everybody else,” he says.
Marvin served as director of the Pacific Northwest Anti-Defamation League for almost 13 years beginning in 1982, and then went on to work at the state insurance commissioner’s Holocaust Survivors Assistance Office. A founding board member of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, he received their prestigious “Faces of Courage Award” in 1998. He’s also worked for the Democratic National Committee, most recently as an employment training counselor.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” Marvin says. “It’s pretty intense, but it’s doing a lot of different things at the same time.”
When I asked what else he does for fun, he mentioned his work on the Seattle Human Rights Commission (he’s vice-chair). He notes that the current economic crisis and subsequent government budget cuts have huge human rights implications.
“How are those cuts going to impact people’s human rights,” in terms of medical and housing needs?
“The unfortunate thing is,” he says, “the people who need those services most are the most impacted by the cuts.” He wants to bring together different voices and different agencies “to see if there’s a way to be more efficient and less wasteful and redundant” in helping hard-pressed communities.
Marvin says (for a really fun time) he most enjoys hanging out with his wife Michele, a teacher at the Seattle Jewish Community School, and their kids Rafi, 19, a student at the University of Washington, and Shira, 16, a junior at Nathan Hale High School. (Rafi, the subject of a previous M.O.T. profile for his winning Scrabble ways, is still playing the game.)
Washington Appleseed is one of a network of 16 Appleseed offices around the country. It’s familiar to the legal community, but not so much outside of that. You can learn more about it at
www.waappleseed.org.
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I’ve mentioned the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous here before, but this organization always deserves a plug, especially when a local person has taken up their cause.
JFR was created in 1986 to provide financial assistance to non-Jews who risked their lives and the lives of their families to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Today there are 1,200 such folks in 26 countries.
The organization raises awareness by matching (or “twinning”) Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids with one of these righteous gentiles. Benjamin Dewhurst of Mercer Island, whose Bar Mitzvah is next weekend at Temple B’nai Torah, is taking part in this program. He has been twinned with Emilia Maksimova who is in her 90s and lives in Gelendzhik, Russia. In 1941, Emilia and her parents hid a 10-year-old Jewish girl named Nusia who they found alone and freezing on the streets of their Ukraine town. Nusia lives in Israel and is still in touch with Emilia.
Benjamin and his family learned about JFR when they were looking for Bar Mitzvah invitations on the Internet.
“It just stuck out,” Benjamin says. “I thought it would be a really cool thing to do.” (Purchasing the JFR B’nai Mitzvah invitations is one way to support the foundation.)
“It was about the people who helped Jewish people during the Holocaust,” he further explained. “Since the Holocaust was one of the worst times ever…the people who helped them were very special and we can find miracles…demonstrated by what they did.”
Benjamin, the son of Rebecca Fox-Dewhurst and Tim Dewhurst, and the sister of Gillian, attends Islander Middle School. He’s a very busy young man who, in addition to preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, has kept up with his extracurricular activities including playing soccer and singing in the Northwest Boychoir. He’s earning extra money to donate to JFR by helping out around the house and working for his dad, a cardiologist at the Polyclinic in Seattle.
“He has a huge stack of really old papers,” says Benjamin. “I organize them into categories.”
His parents plan to match his donation. There’s more information about the JFR at www.jfr.org.