Current Events

This Tuesday 18th October, it’s Anti-Slavery Day.

Slavery still needs abolishing, and we want you to join with René Cassin and Anti-Slavery International to end it once and for all. 

Faith groups played a key part in stopping the transatlantic slave trade in the 1800s. Members of the Jewish community can and still do play a part today in campaigning to end slavery.  At Passover recently, we ate bitter herbs to remind us of our slavery and were asked to engage in Tikkun Olam: healing the world and bringing justice to it.

Slavery is when a person is forced to work, controlled and restricted by their ‘employers’. 

It is when a person is dehumanised, treated as property, and bought and sold.

Affecting children, women and men, it includes trafficking, descent-based slavery and bonded and forced labour.

Slavery has not gone away. 

It exists in your area and neighbourhood, not just in other countries, and there are a minimum of 12.3 million people in slavery around the world.

René Cassin and Anti-Slavery International are working together to raise awareness of contemporary slavery in the Jewish community, and to raise funds for our work to eradicate slavery.

René Cassin is a human rights charitable organisation that uses historical Jewish experience and positive Jewish values to campaign and educate on universal human rights issues. 

The organisation is named in honour of René Cassin, one of the principal co-drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  

Anti-Slavery International is the world’s oldest international human rights organisation. 

Having led on the historical abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, it works today to end all forms of slavery at local, national and international levels.

We identify slavery abuses and raise awareness of them. 

We also stop them from continuing and help former slaves not to slip back into slavery, as well as prevent new abuses taking place in the future.

We work with international partners on joint projects to end slavery.

René Cassin has recently launched a campaign to end slavery and is working on raising awareness of the existence of modern slavery in the UK, Europe and Israel.  We are seeking meaningful reform to existing laws and are working  to change attitudes that perpetuate slavery.  We are currently conducting research and gathering evidence on slavery in Israel.

We are seeking members of the Jewish community to collaborate with René Cassin and Anti-Slavery International in this work.

If you are interested, please e-mail simone.abel@renecassin.org.

Slavery needs to be abolished, so that every human being can live and work in safety, with dignity, choice and freedom, and have recourse to justice.

Every human being's life is beyond a price.

Please also donate today, and support us in our work to create a future free of slavery. Click here to donate, or go to:

http://www.antislaveryfundraising.org/renecassin

Thank you for your help and support.