Eco-Shabbat and helping small islands - Jewish Commonwealth plan to battle climate change - The Jewish Chronicle

The Commonwealth Jewish Council (CJC) has called on international Jewish communities to observe an ‘eco-Shabbat’ this weekend, in an effort to help combat climate change.

The Board of Deputies has published a guide on cooking a sustainable dinner and cleaning up in an environmentally friendly way, to be used this Shabbat, commencing Friday 5th November.

It comes as the CJC kicked off the “Small Islands: Big Challenges” campaign, a raft of green measures that all Jews could adopt in order to help protect poorer island nations.

The islands, mostly in the Pacific and the Caribbean, are likely to be most vulnerable to rising sea levels or extreme weather caused by a heating planet.

The growing importance of the issue was highlighted as leaders from around the world gathered at the Cop26 conference in Glasgow this week.

CJC chief executive Clive Lawton explained to the JC the reasoning behind the campaign.

He said: “Two aspects touched us closely. The first is the terrible insecurity of fearing the loss of your home. Most Jews are not much more than three or four generations from such fears and the actual experience.

“The second is the fear of being small and therefore friendless in the international political arena where super-power politics leaves you a pawn in the interplay of far greater forces.

“We wanted small island nations to know that they had a friend in the Jews.”

Originally launched in 2019 with the involvement of environmental expert Sir David King, the campaign calls upon international lenders to alleviate the burden of debt for small island nations.

Many find themselves trapped in a financial downward spiral as they repeatedly repair infrastructure damaged by extreme weather.

Mr Lawton said: “To the best of our knowledge, there are hardly any Jews, if any, in the Pacific islands but that is not a reason not to care.

“They face rising sea levels, the loss of their agricultural land to seawater salination and, in some cases, the utter disappearance of their islands altogether. The islands of the Caribbean, where the CJC has ten members, instead face ever more regular extreme weather incidents, smashing up their homes, ripping up their roads and bridges, destroying their power networks and, of course, destroying their tourist industry, by which many of them survive.”

He added: “Jews are only a tiny proportion of the world’s population, but we can make a difference.

“We’ve been doing it for millennia. Time to do it again.” The CJC claimed one of the limited slots for events at Cop26 to stage a debate: “Are Religious Leaders Rising to the Climate Challenge?”

Mr Lawton said: “We sought to both put religions on the map but also challenge the current state of religious leadership on this most pressing of issues for the whole world.”

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis was joined on the panel by The Right Reverend Olivia Graham, Bishop of Reading, and Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi, Chief Imam, Scottish Ahlul Bayt Society, while Hindu and Sikh religious leaders also contributed remotely.

Rabbi Mirvis told the audience in Glasgow: “This is a religious subject; we must respond in a religious way, and take a religious lead for our society.”

In a flyer under the heading “How can you get involved?” the CJC has proposed a five-point plan to coincide with Cop26 for the Jewish community, including proposals for an eco-Shabbat.

The plan also calls upon concerned Jews to lobby governments, rethink travel and consumer habits, and use “our voices and platforms”, as well as following the Cop26 proceedings.

Details of the eco-Shabbat can be found at ecosynagogue.org.