Rabbi Barbara Penzner has had a very busy last couple of months. The Temple Hillel B’nai Torah leader received the 2011 Human Rights Award from Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.
Penzner also was honored as the first rabbi that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino invited to speak at the State of the City address. Penzner performed the innovation.
She is also a founding member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a faith-based community organizing initiative instrumental in improving worker conditions in nursing homes and securing health care for all Massachusetts residents.
In December, Temple Hillel B’nai Torah held a reception to celebrate its rabbi. Penzner sat down with West Roxbury Patch to talk about the award, her work in the community and what drives her to help others.
How were you chosen for the Human Rights Award?
Penzner: My congregation submitted two letters and I was selected from a group of other rabbis. I think that’s what was most moving was that my congregants wanted me to have this award.
Did you not know they nominated you?
Penzner: I knew that I was being nominated, because they wanted to know if I could make the event. But I didn’t know who nominated me.
What does the award mean to you?
Penzner: For me, it’s an opportunity to shed light on the issues facing average workers in this terrible economic time. And how even people with jobs are being taken advantage by employers who are making very comfortable profits.
You are championed for your work in trying to secure fair wages/benefits for housekeepers at the Hyatt Hotel chain. What made you pursue that issue?
Penzer: The Hyatt housekeepers were fired, all 98 were fired and replaced with subcontracted workers with less benefits and less wages – and the housekeeprs had trained their replacements. When I found that out I felt like I had to do something. When this happened in August of 2009 even the governor expressed his outrage.
And conditions in nursing homes?
Penzner: A lot of things that have been going on concern me (in nursing homes). Giving diginity to certified nursing assistants… In West Roxbury we all have members of congregations in these facilities.
Please talk about your work with social issues such as being the sole rabbi in a Boston interfaith coalition in support of GLBT rights, Black-Jewish and Muslim-Jewish relations?
Penzner: I believe in building bridges. Jews today live in a society where we can’t separate ourselves and we know the pain of being discriminated and persecuted against. So we have a special feeling for minority groups who face discrmination.
Those two initiatives came from congregants who had connections in those communities and felt it was important to share, get to know each other. Especially living in the city we thought it was important to be building bridges with other communities in the city.
You were also one of the first rabbis to perform a same-sex marriage? But they have to be Jewish?
Penzner: Being a supporter of GLBT rights go back to my early days in college when the gay rights movement was just opening up and I witnessed the pain when people can’t express themselves fully in society. I really believe in marriage and if two people want to meet that commiment, raise a family, I’d rather support them then two jews who don’t take marriages seriously.
I have done my share of interfaith marriages.
What are you working on now?
Penzner: The thing I’m working on this year, is the tomato pickers in Florida, Immokalee, in southwest Florida. All tomatoes eaten come from this place in the winter. Those workers are not only the poorest workers in the country, many have been abused, enslaved and not allowed to leave their jobs. I went down to witness their surffering, with the coalition to improve conditions. This year we are involved to get Trader Joes to sign onto a contract to pay their tomato workers a penny a pound more. This is through the congregation.
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