Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
If there was ever such a thing as a professional volunteer, Gail Bober would be it.
The Elkins Park resident, who worked professionally with the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for 33 years, now spends her time with the Mishkan Shalom Immigrant and Refugee Working Group, the Northwest Regional Immigrant and Refugee Network, another immigrant group called Welcoming Homes, the Jewish Relief Agency, KleinLife JCC, Connectedly, and the Thomas Creighton School, among other organizations.
Her volunteer work in the community is so thorough that Mishkan Shalom gave her an award for her various accomplishments last year. But for Bober, it’s about the mission, not the acclaim. While her work with one immigrant group has concluded, there is so much more work to be done, she said.
“What touches my heart now is a similar situation,” she said.
The immigrant and refugee working group helped settle three men from Afghanistan in the Delaware Valley, while Welcoming Homes has worked to place 10 refugee children in loving homes and is working to help more. Working on behalf of immigrants and refugees is a laborious task. And in today’s America, that work can often be in direct conflict with the aims of the current presidential administration. For Bober, the cause is too important to ignore.
“I can’t say for sure why it [matters to me], except to say that my father was an immigrant who came over to the United States,” she said. “He really gave back to the community in that way and through the synagogue. So I guess I sort of got it that way.”
Welcoming Homes was started by two Mishkan Shalom members who wanted to help refugees get to safety and achieve the American Dream. Bober said that the people who have come to the program are varied, but one thing is the same: They need help.
“We have a young woman who was trafficked. We needed a place for her to stay. So [someone] took her into their house, and then it kept expanding,” she said. “There was a shelter in Arizona that was housing young unaccompanied minors. Once those minors reach 18, if they don’t have a family member or somewhere to go, they get turned over to adult detention. So they found out about [the program] and so far 10 immigrant youths have been placed in various homes across the community.”
The Mishkan Shalom Immigrant and Refugee group is also notable because it is an interfaith effort, Bober said.
“We helped them find housing, get work permits, find jobs and buy cars,” she said. “That interfaith team really worked together.”
But Bober’s work to this end is more extensive than just caring for refugees and immigrants. The interfaith group is part of a larger organization called the New Sanctuary Movement, which lobbies on behalf of the immigrant and refugee community.
“For a couple of years, we’ve been pushing the legislature here in Pennsylvania for what was called ‘Driver’s Licenses For All.’ They’ve been pushing it for more than 10 years. It used to be that anyone could get a license, and then when September 11 happened, that shut down,” she said.
Bober’s work with the refugee and immigrant communities extends to KleinLife JCC in Northeast Philadelphia, where much of the clientele is Russian. She said that she has been able to work with a group that helps the community members get to know each other with questions big and small. It has become popular enough that some of the attendees aren’t Jewish.
“We come together twice a month, and I usually have a prompt. Sometimes it’s a lighthearted question, like ‘what was your first job,’ and sometimes it’s about the fears of aging, or talking about what it’s like to lose an adult child,” she said. “We have a great little community, in a different way.”
Bober first moved to the City of Brotherly Love in 1978. She came with a friend who had always wanted to live in the city, and decided that it was a good move for her too because it was closer to her then-boyfriend in New York. Her first job was with the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, which was a Jewish-supported nursing home that has since been renamed and moved.
“I fell in love with the city almost immediately. It reminded me of Baltimore, with lots of little individual, ethnic communities,” she said. “I felt at home quickly.”
Not long after that, she attended a small synagogue for the High Holidays, with no plans to become involved beyond that. That synagogue was Mishkan Shalom, and for Bober, she realized very quickly that she had found a home beyond a service or two.
“It’s special because it is so welcoming and open to hearing various viewpoints,” she said. “Everyone cares for the community at large.”
As for Bober, her work won’t stop anytime soon. In fact, it’s more likely that she adds another responsibility than it is for her to drop a current one.
“I’m not a terribly observant person — it’s the sense of caring there. The [phrase] tikkun olam really fits at Mishkan.”
It fits Mishkan Shalom, and it fits Bober, too.