Elgin rabbi focuses on social justice with Guatemala trip
It's perhaps no surprise Rabbi Margaret Frisch Klein earned a selective social justice fellowship after having grown up in a family that favored attending political events and peace rallies over religious services.
Later in life, the Elgin rabbi dreamed of joining the Peace Corps, but chose the rabbinate because she believed that would be a good way to fulfill the social justice mission, she said.
Frisch Klein, of Congregation Kneseth Israel in Elgin, just wrapped up the fellowship from American Jewish World Service, a nonprofit international human rights organization based in New York City, with a weeklong trip to Guatemala earlier this month.
The trip included stops in the cities of Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango, and Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan mountains.
The fellows spent time talking with Guatemalans engaged in social justice, ranging from the struggle to allow sex education in schools to the fight to keep land rights for farmers, Frisch Klein said. Overall, the focus of the fellowship was on the rights of women and girls, as well as the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, she said.
“To see how those rights around sexual education, around education in general for women and girls, are playing out in Guatemala dovetails so nicely, unfortunately, with the work that I am already doing in Elgin.”
For example, she brought back Spanish-language sexual education materials to Elgin's Community Crisis Center, one of the organizations she works with. She also collaborates with the police department and the Coalition of Elgin Religious Leaders, is involved with the One Billion Rising movement to end violence against women, and is the chairwoman of the 16th Judicial Court faith committee on domestic violence, she said.
“We have a responsibility to take care of our own, but we have a responsibility to take care of a much wider net,” she said. “That would include city of Elgin stuff — which is why I'm involved in those organizations — and a wider swath beyond that.”
Frisch Klein was among a group of about 15 fellows, selected out of up to 80 applicants, including rabbis, rabbinical students and lay leaders in Jewish communities across the United States, said Ruth W. Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service. The fellows initially were scheduled to go to Kenya last summer, but the trip was deemed unsafe because of unrest in the country, she said.
The goal is for the fellows to bring the organization's mission and their experiences on the trip into their own communities, Messinger said.
“We expect to see the experience they just had reflected in their writings, blogs, articles and sermons over the next several months,” Messinger said.
Frisch Klein, who is chronicling that on her blog, The Energizer Rabbi, said it's always useful to gain a different perspective.
“We all, as Americans, think we know how to do things best,” she said. “So sometimes it's good to look at another view.”