Reaching Out to Non-Jews : American Jewish World Service Aims at Helping Third World : Missions: The goal is to provide non-sectarian, humanitarian aid, and in the process, officials hope to leave a positive image of Jews and Israel.

Not long ago, Nathan Gray, who is Jewish, found himself sitting in a Jeep traveling along a jungle road on the island of Samal in the Philippines. A Roman Catholic priest was behind the wheel, and their destination was a Muslim village.

Gray, who lives in Sausalito, Calif., is the Philippine representative for American Jewish World Service, a private relief and development agency working with non-Jewish, Third World populations. He was on Samal to try to help village fishermen organize their first cooperative marketing venture.

“Picture it!” Gray said. “A Catholic helping a Jew help Muslims. What an image!”

Gray’s example of interfaith cooperation is at the heart of American Jewish World Service’s mission. While a plethora of Jewish organizations exist to aid fellow Jews around the globe, Gray’s is the only American Jewish group that concentrates on non-Jewish, Third World needs.

Dealing primarily with food and health-care concerns in rural areas, the nonprofit organization has worked with Tibetan refugees in India, sent volunteer plastic surgeons to operate on poor children in Colombia and helped finance a grain milling project in Cameroon.

In all, the organization has distributed over $7.5 million in more than 20 nations since it was founded in 1985. That first year, its budget was $400,000. This year, the budget was $2.5 million.

American Jewish World Service officials emphasize that their primary intent is to provide non-sectarian, humanitarian aid. But in the process, they added, they hope their good works will also leave positive images of Jews and Israel with those they help.

“The anti-Semitic canard is that Jews only take care of themselves,” said author and executive committee member Anne Roiphe, who is based in New York. “AJWS shows that to be untrue and it does so in an identifiably Jewish framework.”

For the most part, the organization works with populations that have had little, if any, firsthand experience with Jews. Often, their governments are politically cool toward Israel. So, if there are Jews living in a Third World nation, the service organization tries to build good will by involving them in its efforts. Whenever possible, AJWS also utilizes non-governmental Israeli expertise.

Following the devastating 1985 volcano eruption that killed more that 22,000 in Colombia, for instance, Colombia’s small Jewish community and Israeli technicians joined with the group to build a brick factory so that some of those displaced by the disaster had jobs while they produced materials needed to reconstruct their homes and businesses.

American Jewish World Service also has introduced Israeli-built portable plastic silos in Togo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and other African and Asian nations to reduce grain storage loss.

“We are not an Israeli organization, but we don’t work in nations that are overtly hostile to Israel,” explained Andy Griffel, executive director. “But we do work in nations that are lukewarm toward Israel, and we have seen a softening of attitudes because of our work.”

The organization was conceived by shirt-making executive Lawrence S. Phillips, president of Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., who in the early 1980s traveled to Honduras and El Salvador on behalf of Oxfam, the secular international relief agency.

After seeing the work done there by Catholic, Quaker, Mennonite and other Christian agencies, Phillips said he felt “it was of critical importance that a Jewish agency should also exist, both as a matter of pride and as a fulfillment of Judaism’s fundamental tenets of tzedakah (Hebrew for justice and compassionate caring) and tikkun olam (making the world a better place).”

“I was concerned that the absence of this kind of commitment was also one reason why a great number of Jews find it difficult to identify with the organized Jewish community.”

Phillips’ idea touched a nerve, and he was able to interest a number of well-known Jewish activists. Among those serving on the group’s board of trustees are author Elie Wiesel, television producer Norman Lear, Henry Siegman of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Irving Greenberg of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, World Jewish Congress Vice President Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and Albert Vorspan, director of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism.

“We needed a modern mechanism with which Jews could express their universal concerns,” said Rabbi Harvey Fields of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, another board member. “We needed a reminder that Jews have a special obligation to care for others.”

But despite the involvement of prominent Jews, the group’s growth has been slow. Phillips noted that only 22,000 of the estimated 6 million Jews in the United States have so far contributed funds. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Executive director Griffel said part of the problem has been organizational. Until recently, he said, the group’s headquarters was in Boston and its leadership was focused more on its international effort than blending into the Jewish community Establishment.

This past summer, the service’s seven-person professional staff moved to New York, the center of American Jewish life, and went through an internal reorganization. Griffel, an attorney with experience in international trade and nonprofit agencies, came in during the reorganization.

Griffel also noted some resistance from established Jewish charitable groups, which, he said, feared that the international relief agency would siphon off donations that would otherwise go to strictly Jewish needs.

Roiphe, however, said that American Jewish World Service has tapped an entirely new funding source--socially concerned Jews with little Jewish community involvement who previously donated their time or money to non-Jewish organizations.

“We’re not taking anything away from Israel or local Jewish federations,” she said. “We’re saying that if you are Jewish, rather than giving to Catholic Relief Services, donate through AJWS.”

The organization works through chapters of “associates,” or volunteers, scattered around the country. The organization is strongest in the northeast, where chapters are active in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. On the West Coast, chapters include those in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On occasion, the group gets involved in domestic disaster relief projects. In the last year, the organization has funneled $30,000 to victims of Hurricane Hugo in Charleston, S.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and $100,000 to San Francisco Bay Area earthquake victims.

In both instances, Griffel said, contributors made it clear that they wanted their aid tied to an identifiably Jewish agency.

“Across the board,” he said, “the message we received is that these people were happy that a Jewish organization was finally out there among everybody else who helps.”