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Dr. Charles Jacobs is President of the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) in Boston. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and on ABC, NPR and CBS. Last April, he witnessed the redemption of 2,953 slaves in Sudan and he received the Freedom Award by Coretta Scott King.
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By Dr. Charles Jacobs
March 27, 2002
As Jews at Seder tables around the world reenact our redemption from bondage, we should take special note that slavery is not history. Indeed there are more slaves today - 27 million, by conservative estimate -- than at any time in history. Slaves... not people with bad jobs, nasty bosses and low pay, but people who are forced to work for no pay under the threat of violence.
In Pakistan, children are sold into bondage so parents can feed those left at home. In India, child slaves are shackled to looms to weave carpets...found in middle class homes around the world. In Brazil, men are forced to cut and burn the rainforest to make charcoal... used to make iron to forge steel, which may be found in our cars. Girls and women are trafficked around the globe. Even here there are slaves. The CIA estimates there are 40-50,000 slaves imported into the United States each year. These are mostly sex-trafficked women from China, but right here in Quincy, Massachusetts a few years ago, a family from Kuwait was arrested for bringing their Sri Lankan slave to serve them while the husband was a grad student at Boston University.
Perhaps the worst case - and in a way, a very Jewish case - is that of Sudan. In this, Africa's largest country, a Taliban-like Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum is waging a Jihad ("holy war") on the African peoples on the South, many of whom are Christian. Two million have been killed in this, the longest lasting - and most ignored - armed conflict since WWII. And the jihad has rekindled the trade in black slaves.
In this war, slave raids are the terror weapon of choice. Arab militia, armed by the regime, storm African villages, in scenes we would recall as pogroms. The men are shot. The women and children are taken into bondage. Boys become goatherds. If they loose their master's goat, they might have a finger chopped off. (We have photos of this.) Women become concubines. Many slaves are forced to convert to a faith not their own.
The purpose of the jihad is to establish Koranic Law throughout the country and to reduce the Christian population to a state of "dhimmitude" - Islamic serfs. (Jews living under Islamic rule were also "dhimmis" - protected and "tolerated" by a pact of submission -- with attendant disabilities.) The African Christians have refused this status and have fought for decades for their freedom.
The West has generally ignored their plight. Though the Holocaust Museum in Washington has listed Sudan on its "Genocide Watch," and though the UN, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have documented that slaving - a crime against humanity - is a policy of Khartoum, the African victims and slaves fight on practically alone.
A religio-fascist regime murders and enslaves a minority population. It has declared it will do away with these people, but the so-called "civilized" world looks away. As Jews, we should hear echoes. And we should act.
To take note of all the world's slaves, this year The American Anti-Slavery Group and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism have initiated a Passover Anti-Slavery Project --- "Because we were slaves"... at www.iabolish.com/passover. Also participating is the Conservative Movement's Rabbinical Assembly, and many Jewish day schools. The Project includes articles, Jewish texts on slavery, photos, sermons, petitions, debates, curricula, prayers, and a Seder table reminder.
Francis Bok, an escaped jihad slave from Sudan, has been touring synagogues around the nation to ask help from the Jewish community in setting his people free. "I, like you, was a slave in Africa. I escaped, but for thousands of my people, Exodus has not come. The Jews know the Pharaohs. I know they will help."
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