Rabbi Joshua Ratner of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University recently joined 14 rabbis and a cantor to travel to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to meet with members of Congress and their staff, including Sen. Chris Murphy and Sen. Richard Blumenthal. The rabbis were concerned about potential funding cuts to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main drivers of U.S. foreign aid and diplomacy. The group of clergy are Global Justice Fellows with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), the international Jewish human rights and development organization. They recently traveled as a group to the Dominican Republic to study human rights violations there, and they connected their concern about U.S. foreign aid to the struggles they witnessed in the Dominican Republic.

CAP: Rabbi Josh Ratner meeting with U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) in the Senator’s Washington, D.C. office.