Facing investigations by state and city agencies, a San Francisco rape crisis center has cooled its anti-Zionist language.
Last week, an online application form asked volunteers and interns at San Francisco Women Against Rape to participate in “political education discussions” that have recently included “protesting the war and supporting Palestinian liberation and taking a stance against Zionism.”
On Tuesday, the form had been changed to ask volunteers to “participate in discussions so that we all can learn from our diverse experiences. In the recent past, these discussions have been about exploring the connections between sexual assault and race, class, gender, imperialism, colonialism, and militarism. Can you commit to participate in these critical discussions?”
As of press time Wednesday, the form was completely removed from the Web site of the nonprofit organization, which receives some $630,625 yearly in public funds.
The removal came as officials at the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning and at the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women reported Tuesday that they were investigating the political practices at SFWAR, a 30-year-old program based in the Women’s Building in the Mission District.
“This was brought to our attention in late June via an e-mail,” said Tim Herrera, public information officer for the OCJP, which provided SFWAR with $352,635 in grants in the fiscal year ending June 30.
“We are attempting to schedule a site visit with that agency to discuss this matter and others.”
Meanwhile, Belle Taylor-McGhee, executive director of the S.F. women’s department, told the Bulletin, “I am aware of it, and we are dealing with it at the department level. I can’t comment beyond that.” Her agency is giving SFWAR $277,990 in funding this year.
Nina Jusuf, SFWAR’s executive director, failed to return calls Tuesday and Wednesday. In an e-mail sent last week to the Bulletin, she described the agency as “anti-Zionist,” but denied that it discriminated against Jewish clients, volunteers or others.
“SFWAR, after much consideration, has come to understand that the current policy of Zionism is racism,” Jusuf’s statement read.
In another development, a 25-year-old Jewish woman now attending medical school in Canada told the Bulletin she resigned as a SFWAR volunteer in May 2002 after being verbally attacked as a “racist” at a monthly meeting that spring. She said she also repeatedly received anti-Zionist articles “for educational purposes,” and attended a SFWAR lecture by a Jewish man proclaiming the view that “Zionist imperialism set up Israel.”
“I signed up to work for an anti-rape organization, not a political organization,” said Ellen Tunitsky, a Russian emigre who volunteered at SFWAR for about eight hours a week starting sometime around August 2001. After a 60-hour training program, Tunitsky said she answered 24-hour hotline calls from women in crisis and served as an advocate for rape victims seeking medical treatment.
“The last thing I’d like to see is this organization dismantled,” Tunitsky said in a phone interview Tuesday from Montreal. She described SFWAR’s services to sexual assault survivors as “excellent.”
But after the verbal attack by a staff member, who Tunitsky declined to identify, “the gates were open” with anti-Zionist sentiment, she said. “I tried not to be around that.”
Tunitsky described the political atmosphere at the agency as “incredibly upsetting” and questioned whether “anti-Jewish” sentiments would spill over into the organization’s work with women in crisis.
“How can a person all of a sudden shut off their thoughts and beliefs and be there for the person who is in need?” Tunitsky questioned.
“I feel silenced and attacked,” she wrote in a May 2002 resignation letter she provided the Bulletin. “I don’t feel that the inclusion of views that are pro-Israel, pro-Zionism…is racist, ‘pro-white’ or anything else.
“One of the most useful things I learned at SFWAR was that we shouldn’t make tokens out of individuals from a particular cultural or racial group to represent everything about that culture, religion [or] race. I feel that SFWAR has been doing exactly that, by sending articles and inviting speakers written by anti-Zionist Jews without letting other Jewish members to speak.”
In the phone interview, Tunitsky said that several additional volunteers resigned as well because of SFWAR’s anti-Israel stand. “I left when it just all started,” she said.
Tunitsky, who came to the United States at age 14 to escape ethnic cleansing in Tajikistan, said she was “torn” in her feelings about SFWAR. “On the one hand, I don’t want Jewish organizations to give money to this organization. On the other, they’re the only organization doing this work” with rape victims, she said.
Last week, the S.F.-based Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, which gave a $10,000 grant this year to SFWAR, said it was “dismayed” by the application language and planned to “deal with the issue in due course.”
SFWAR’s 24-hour hotline answered more than 3,000 calls in 2001-02. The agency, which says it reaches more than 11,000 people annually with sexual assault intervention and prevention services, is the only center in San Francisco receiving state OCJP grants for its rape and sexual-assault programs.
On its Web site, SFWAR says it has eight staff members and more than 80 volunteers and interns. A mission statement reads: “We believe that sexual assault exists within a web of many oppressions.”
The OCJP’s Herrera said Tuesday that a two-person state team hopes to conduct the inspection in late July, and said that SFWAR officials have been informed of the state agency’s planned inspection.
For the fiscal year that ended June 30, the OCJP gave the agency $273,635 for rape crisis services and another $79,000 for a sexual assault response team.
Herrera didn’t know what the consequences of the state inspection might be. “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it,” he said. The OCJP last conducted a satisfactory site visit of the center in March.
Herrera was uncertain, however, whether inspectors were aware of the controversial application form at the time. “I don’t know if it’s something normally on the radar screen,” he said.
The discovery that SFWAR had changed its wording on the applications doesn’t end the controversy, according to Abby Michelson Porth, associate director of S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.
“In our minds, the issue is not moot,” Porth said. “It’s not just a question of removing the offensive wording in a volunteer application. There’s clearly an environment in which Zionism is despised, still exists.”
Porth fears such a “hostile environment” could hamper the agency’s work, preventing sexual assault survivors who are Jewish from seeking SFWAR’s help.
Porth and Naomi Tucker, executive director of Shalom Bayit, a Jewish domestic violence program based in Oakland, are trying to arrange a meeting with SFWAR officials.
Last week, Jusuf agreed to meet, but no date for the gathering has been set, according to Tucker.
Tucker estimated that she’d received a dozen calls from rabbis and “concerned community leaders” in the past week.
When contacted last week about the issue, Tracy Salkowitz, former director of the regional office of the American Jewish Congress and past executive director of the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, replied: “I’m appalled but not surprised.”
Salkowitz described SFWAR’s stand as part of a wider political atmosphere that exists in the Bay Area.
“Anti-Semitism does and has existed in the women’s movement,” she asserted.
“It’s just an attempt to scapegoat and negatively bind people together in ignorance.”