I just finished writing rewriting this article for a Jewish writing class and I can’t bear that I don’t know when, if ever, it will see the light of day. So, I’m hoping some of you speed readers will give it a second chance and let me know what you think.

Redefining Community:

Ari Hart Builds a Better Neighborhood

Ari Hart doesn’t like the glare of the spotlight. And he’s equally troubled by undue praise—he doesn’t want anyone mistaking him for a saint. Lucky for Mr. Hart, there’s plenty to be done behind the scenes at Uri L’Tzedek, the New York-based social justice organization. As co-director, Ari Hart is working to change the way the Orthodox Jewish community views social justice activism. But Mr. Hart isn’t the face of Uri L’Tzedek and that’s just the way he likes it.

So, it’s no surprise to find twenty-six-year-old Ari Hart in the back of the room during an Uri L’Tzedek event. Mr. Hart looks on while Lead Professional, Rabbi Ari Weiss and other equally youthful volunteer activists role-play through skits. Thirty young Jews have turned out on one chilly afternoon to learn more about Tav HaYosher, or ethical seal in Hebrew, a local, grassroots initiative to bring workers, restaurant owners and community members together to create just workplaces in kosher restaurants. At Uri L’Tzedek, Mr. Hart is one among many fresh faces at the helm. Shmuly Yanklowitz, the twenty-something co-founder and Director of Uri L’Tzedek, was recently featured in a New York Times article after speaking about Tav HaYosher at Yeshiva University. The Tav HaYosher initiative marks a sharp detour from the organization’s more controversial boycott of Agriprocessors, the Iowa slaughterhouse and meat-packaging factory currently under federal investigation, a move that made Uri L’Tzedek infamous in some Jewish circles.

So while Yanklowitz and Weiss continue to represent the public face of Uri L’Tzedek in the media, Hart is more comfortable as one of the brains behind the whole operation. What’s more as Uri L’Tzedek, which bills itself as a “social justice movement,” expands its reach beyond New York City to captivate the hearts and minds of Jewish college students and young professionals all over the United States, Mr. Hart has become an integral part of how the organization effects change closer to home, particularly in his own Washington Heights neighborhood.

But why does a guy from Biloxi, Mississippi care so much about Washington Heights?

Ari Hart was frustrated by the way the Orthodox community interacted with the rest of the Washington Heights community. “I realized really quickly that there were very few if any institutional relationships,” Mr. Hart said of living in Washington Heights, where he moved over a year ago to begin attending the rabbinical school, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Manhattan-based open Orthodox institution founded by social justice activist Rabbi Avi Weiss. “No one I knew actually knew anyone in the community outside the Jewish community. People were saying racist things about ‘the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood’ [at the Shabbos table]. I was like, oh man, they’re not even Puerto Rican! There was just so much ignorance and racism.”

The chasm between the Orthodox Jewish community and the greater, mostly Dominican, Washington Heights community was chronicled in “New Voices,” a Jewish student magazine, in 2005. “The separation between YU and the rest of Washington Heights is blatant,” said Yeshiva University sophomore Joshua Balderman. He added that interactions between the two communities often take on a negative hue. Balderman shuttered his own YU Community Club, a club that planned to enact several social justice initiatives in the local community, due to lack of interest.

The “New Voices” article painted a somewhat bleak picture of community relations. It chronicled muggings in the university area and a Purim video in which local Hispanic students were filmed yelling, “YU sucks!,” as a caption below read “Future Beren Campus Security Guards.” Given that kind of climate, Balderman had hoped to pursue true cooperation, not just tolerance. Despite “major cultural and language barriers,” Balderman said he believed that “work[ing] together these communities could both be affected in a positive way.”

Where young Balderman failed, Ari Hart has flourished. It certainly helps that when Mr. Hart decided to change the face of Washington Heights, it was not his first venture in social justice activism. When Hart moved to Washington Heights with a degree in Music Theory and Composition from Grinnell College under his belt, he was just picking up where he’d left off in Chicago.

But wait, how does someone make the leap from majoring in Music to community organizing?

“Music is universal. It’s a language everyone speaks. All music is built on the same things but it’s expressed in so many different ways,” Mr. Hart said. Music theory analyzes the building blocks of music and how music functions. As a Music Theory major, Mr. Hart took different types of music, from chord progressions in rock and roll to sampling in hip hop, and isolated the areas where they diverged and connected. “I took old things and used them in a different way, tried to find the differences and what makes things similar.” This way of looking at music was rooted deeply in the way Hart already looked at the world.

At a young age, bounced between Spanish preschool in Madrid and religious and public schools in the States because of his father’s Air Force job, Ari Hart honed a curiosity for “different people and places and learning how different systems function and how people work together or do not work together.” Engrossed by trying to find the commonalities within the diversity he was exposed to, Mr. Hart learned: “It’s possible to move between different social spheres. The barriers between people aren’t as big as people think they are. It’s possible to change, to move, to be different. It’s possible to be who you are and retain a sense of self and do that in wildly different places with wildly different people.”

By age 23, Ari Hart was in Chicago working as an advocate for abused and neglected children in Cook County as part of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). At age 24, he won a Nadiv Social Justice Fellowship through the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. The next year Mr. Hart launched Or Tzedek, the Teen Institute for Social Justice, where he worked with teens whose backgrounds ran across the broad Jewish spectrum, from unaffiliated to Orthodox. He resigned as director when he decided to come to New York to pursue his rabbinical degree at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, where he has since been awarded the 2008 Herbert Lieberman Award for Community Service.

Given his previous background in social justice activism, Ari Hart came to the Washington Heights community prepared. But some might argue his goals are lofty. Mr. Hart said: “One thing I’m particularly interested in is relationships between the Orthodox community and broader communities and mobilizing the Orthodox community to act beyond narrowly defined self-interest and to be partners in the improvement of society for everyone, including the Orthodox community, not only for people outside, for everybody together.”

Mr. Hart explored this idea further in a telling transcript of a speech he gave on racism that can be found on the Uri L’Tzedek website: “[On Passover,] we are instructed to view ourselves in a position of opportunity and freedom, eager to share our meals with others, eager to share our liberation with those still oppressed. At the same time, we are to view ourselves as if we ourselves were slaves, as if we ourselves were oppressed. This Pesach, as we enjoy our freedom and many blessings, we must not forget our responsibility, and our unique ability to fight for those who are still being enslaved, whether it be by human trafficking, poverty, treatable disease, prejudice, religious persecution or any other form of oppression.”

Ari Hart quoted Martin Luther King, “All too often the religious community has been a taillight instead of a headlight.” The quote can easily be seen as passing judgment on the role of the conservative Orthodox Jewish community in social justice activism. The insular Orthodox Jewish community’s emphasis on tzedekah that is directed mostly internally has historically been eclipsed in the realm of social justice by its more liberal Jewish counterparts, and how the Reform and Conservative movements have broadly applied Jewish teachings on social justice. Mr. Hart continued: “The Jewish people have been a headlight for thousands of years. May Hashem bless us this Pesach that we merit to continue to spread the light of righteousness and justice across the world.”

Right, but some would still argue, why should a Jewish organization concern itself with non-Jews?

“It’s very clear in the Torah that we have to look out for the ger [the stranger], because we were strangers in a strange land and therefore, when there is a stranger in our midst, we have a responsibility to support and protect those who are weak and vulnerable,” Mr. Hart said. But what does this look like in practical terms in Washington Heights?

“A big part is civic engagement and civic action and addressing common problems and finding common solutions and building relationships and partnerships. I began doing that work on my own in Washington Heights, when I first moved there,” Mr. Hart said. “I just started meeting different religious leaders and community activists [in the community] and trying to find out what was going on in the neighborhood, what some of the issues were, what people were working on and also trying to build a group of people in the community who are also interested in working on that as well. I got hooked up with Uri L’Tzedek and they were like that’s great, we should do something together.”

Upon his arrival in Washington Heights, Ari Hart pursued a number of social justice projects before taking things to the next level. He began by becoming a member of the local community board. And last year, Mr. Hart and Uri L’Tzedek collaborated with several Washington Heights organizations on a clothing drive.

“The twist to the clothing drive was that it wasn’t just the Jewish community donating clothes to the Dominican community or to some other community, it was a lot of different groups coming together as a community. We had churches collecting clothes and Jewish people collecting clothes. And it wasn’t just the Dominican community [that benefited], there’s also the broader community, other people in the community, there’s also white people—” Mr. Hart began.

There are white people in Washington Heights? Yes, though, the community, which spans from about 158th St to Dyckman Street, is predominately Dominican (and Jewish in some parts), hot housing prices in Upper Manhattan have brought in an infusion of yuppies from lower Manhattan.

“Yes, there are white folk!” Ari joked before he continued. “We wanted to do a project together. We wanted to bring people together to do something that was positive. It was new and exciting and fun. The process was the purpose. The process of bringing people together and learning about the different organizations in the community, learning about the different services people provide, and having people interact and plan and work.”

Spearheading the process as an Uri L’Tzedek representative, Ari Hart united Alianza Dominicana with other local organizations, including a church and a youth program, to work on local initiatives. Uri L’Tzedek volunteered their people to help Alianza Dominicana coordinate a health fair for disadvantaged women. Then Fort Washington Collegiate Church was brought in to donate clothing for the Alianza Dominicana program. Finally, Fresh Youth Initiatives (FYI), an organization based in Washington Heights that organizes youth to perform service projects around the community, joined by offering, among other things, manpower.

“So it was a lot of finding all these groups and people and becoming the glue linking people together and creating this thing out of all these programs that already existed,” Mr. Hart said. “Honestly the clothing drive itself didn’t really matter.”

Michal Brickman believes Mr. Hart is playing down the impact of the clothing drive. Ms. Brickman is an Uri L’Tzedek volunteer who worked with Hart on the clothing drive and other projects aimed to support the Washington Heights community as a whole. “The initial goal of the drive was to help alleviate a shortage of clothing at a New York psychiatric facility,” Ms. Brickman said. “But the project quickly grew and the drive ultimately succeeded in collecting enough clothing not only for donation to the psychiatric facility but also to three local community organizations in Washington Heights and to a woman in the neighborhood who lost her belongings in an apartment fire.”

Ari Hart does not gloss over the impact that working with FYI teens has had on him. Last March, Uri L’Tzedek joined teens from FYI on a project dubbed ‘The Traveling Clothing Bank.’ FYI teens collected clothing for the project, a clothing drive, and then handed them out in the neighborhood at a weekly event. A lot of the clothes end up traveling from Washington Heights to the Dominican Republic. Mr. Hart organized Uri L’Tzedek volunteers to help out at this FYI event but first, he coordinated a program where the mostly Jewish members of Uri L’Tzedek hung out with the mostly Dominican teens from FYI.

“It was a really profound thing. I live in this community. I’m here every day but I have no interaction with these people. And they’re really cool. They want to make the community better and I want to make the community better,” Mr. Hart said. “People found it very meaningful.”

Carlos Cepeda, a group leader at FYI, agreed.

“At first, I didn’t know what to expect. We come from two different cultures. But after
talking to Ari on the phone, he came across as a really nice guy who’s really concerned about young people and community. I realized that we had a lot in common,” Mr. Cepeda said. “We genuinely care about helping people. Regardless of what race they might be, we want to help.”

Mr. Cepeda believes that working with Ari and the Uri L’Tzedek team has been an illuminating experience for “his kids.”

“Unfortunately there are certain stereotypes that exist in our community. In the Latino community, there’s a stereotype that Jews keep to themselves, are not very social and very cheap. I’m really glad my kids got to meet Ari,” Mr. Cepeda said. “Ari came across as only Ari can. He completely abolished all those thoughts. A lot of the kids said, you know, this is the first Jewish person I got to meet and hang out with, and he’s a great guy. He broke a lot of those stereotypes that some of our kids have.”

After working together on the Traveling Clothing Bank project, Uri L’Tzedek and FYI partnered together on another initiative. Teens from FYI joined Jewish teens from an organization in Queens called The Lounge in some community building activities.

“At the core, good people are good people and we all share more in common than we have differences. We need to know more about each other to break down these stereotypes. We had a kind of cultural exchange,” Mr. Cepeda said. “They brought typical Jewish cuisine and our kids ate from it. We brought our music. We played our music and spent a good half-hour showing each other how to dance. Even though we’re different and we don’t really know each other, this was a time where we reached out to each other and got to know each other as human beings.” A little merengue music and a side of gefilte fish can apparently go a long way towards alleviating the tension between the Dominican and Jewish communities of Washington Heights.

Uri L’Tzedek members and FYI went still one step further, coming together to visit for an exhibit on Sosua at the Jewish Museum. Sosua is the tiny community in the Dominican Republic that took in Jews during the Holocaust. Photographs from the museum trip (and other similar trips in the community) that feature pasty Jewish students and brown-skinned Dominican teens abound on the photo sharing website, Flickr. Mr. Cepeda believes Ari Hart took a major step towards healing the rift between the Dominican and Jewish communities of Washington Heights by reaching out to local nonprofit organizations in the area.

“Ari and some of his colleagues were looking for a way to cross [that divide] because in Washington Heights there’s a big population of Jewish people and there’s a big population of Dominican people but they rarely and seldom interact. I think he saw that as something that needs to be addressed,” Mr. Cepeda said. “Regardless if you’re Dominican, Puerto Rican, Jewish, Russian or Irish, there’s one thing we all have in common and that’s that we live in this community and this community is ours.”

Troy Schremmer, Director of Education at Fort Washington Collegiate Church, is a part of the community. He also painted a very positive picture of working with Ari Hart and Uri L’Tzedek.

“Ari came and found us. He came in one day and we sat down to figure out ways that we can interface. It’s been quite a casual partnership but it’s been a little one sided,” Mr. Schremmer said. “They’ve helped us more than we’ve helped them. We’ve helped them in giving them opportunities to help the community.”

Troy Schremmer has a hard time keeping track of all the organizations Ari Hart has put him in touch with around the neighborhood, everyone from Alianza Dominicana and FYI to the YMHA of Washington Heights & Inwood. Boxes of used clothing were just sitting at the church, which struggles with ways to distribute them, when Ari Hart and his team swooped in to help sort clothing and redistribute it. The day of the drop-offs, Mr. Schremmer drove Ari Hart around and watched as Mr. Hart smoothed all the bumps along the way.

“Ari made all the contacts. I made the drop offs when we did it. I remember the day of, things don’t always go as they’re planned, and Ari was calling ahead as I headed towards different groups. I was in the van and I had to say, ‘Ari where are we going?’ And he’d say, ‘these guys can take some clothes’ and we’d head there. It was fun,” Mr. Schremmer said with a laugh.

Making key contacts is part of Ari Hart’s job description. “I’ve learned the power of relationships,” Mr. Hart said. “The relationship is primary; everything else comes out of this.”

Working with Ari Hart led the church to another partnership with the Hebrew Tabernacle, a Reform Jewish congregation in Washington Heights. Mr. Schremmer feels he’s learned much more about the Jewish community from these experiences. But he’s learned even more about Ari Hart.

“Ari has been trying to raise awareness that people of faith can work together and that we do have common ground, especially when it comes to taking care of our neighbor. That’s an imperative for People of the Book,” Mr. Schremmer said. “I’ve been very encouraged by his attitude about it and just the different ways I’ve seen him show that by example and encourage others to do it.”

Mr. Schremmer strongly believes in what Ari Hart and Uri L’Tzedek are doing for the Washington Heights community.

“He believes in the principles laid out in Torah and how we should be living according to those and how that has direct impact on the Jewish community and folks taking care of one another,” Mr. Schremmer said. “But also how that has ramifications outside of what we perceive as our family or our close-knit community. I see him extending that. I don’t get the impression that he thinks it’s a popular idea or an idea that’s really cool. It really comes from his faith and his understanding of how he reads God’s word and God’s law. I see him as an authentic person who is trying to follow God’s direction in very practical ways in this community he is living in.”

It’s those principles that got Ruth Balinsky involved with Uri L’Tzedek. Ms. Balinksy met Ari Hart when he hired her at her first social justice job as an Or Tzedek staff member in Chicago. Most recently, Ms. Balinsky has worked with Mr. Hart on several projects, including the clothing drive and Tenants Rights Awareness events.

“He has continued to encourage me ever since [Or Tzedek] to pursue more projects in that field. Having worked in a variety of Jewish settings, I am well aware of the importance of Uri L’Tzedek. Not only is ‘Uri’ an extraordinarily competent and impressive organization, its role as an Orthodox voice in the movement is critical to my participation,” Ms. Balinsky said. “While there are many Jewish social justice organizations, few, if any, seriously confront religious issues, and genuinely incorporate them into their work. ‘Uri’ is a perfect blend of religiosity and social justice values, and has catered to the Orthodox community in ways that no other Jewish organization can.”

Ms. Balinsky is particularly passionate about the work Uri L’Tzedek does outside the Jewish community.

“After years of persecution and suffering, Jews finally enjoy a status of privilege in the United States. It would be criminal to enjoy my family’s privilege and success, none of which I personally earned, without repaying my debt to American society, particularly through working with communities that came here under similar circumstances and have unfortunately not been able to succeed as strongly as the Jewish community,” Ms. Balinksy said. “That is one of the reasons I got involved with the clothing drive that worked with the Jewish and Dominican communities in Washington Heights. If we do not engage our neighbors in dialogue, then how can we engage other communities?”

But Ari Hart is quite humble about this work in Washington Heights.

“My biggest frustration is that I don’t know how much I’ve done. I don’t know if the Jewish community has moved any closer to [the rest of the community],” Mr. Hart said. “The hardest thing about this work is that you can spend every hour of every day just going and progress is progress but there are so many forces keeping things the way they are. Sometimes it feels like an unwinnable battle.”

The people Ari Hart has worked with are less humble about what Mr. Hart has done for Washington Heights. Mr. Schremmer clued me into another project Mr. Hart has been working on in his “spare time.”

“Ari’s been real great about making himself available on individual stuff. Not to go into lots of details but he’s helped a lot of individuals in the community who have needed help,” Mr. Schremmer said but he felt uncomfortable disclosing the specific details of these situations. “He’s also made himself available to us to help us with tutoring some of our young people. I know that there’s one specific student Ari’s working with but there’s lots of other students who need help and Ari is helping to network with other possible tutors.”

In spite of all his individual effort, Mr. Hart said, “I don’t want it to be about me.
He said he is still working to “figure out what kind of role to take in different projects, moving projects forward but also empowering people and having it be more than just me going out and doing what I want.”

Currently, Ari Hart is in talks with both Alianza Dominicana and Fort Washington Collegiate Church to coordinate over the tutoring program. But according to Uri L’Tzedek volunteer, Michal Brickman, the tutoring program is just one of two community-based youth initiatives Ari Hart and Uri L’Tzedek are working on.

“The tutoring program will bring desperately needed math and English tutors to local schools and after school programs, both within and outside the Jewish community. And a schools supplies drive will help alleviate the teachers in a Washington Heights public school and a local Jewish day school of the burden of paying out-of-pocket for many of their supplies,” Ms. Brickman said.

Ms. Brickman believes that none of these programs could have happened without Ari Hart’s devotion.

“Although Ari’s only been living in Washington Heights for a little over a year, he’s deeply committed to improving the local community. Ari is passionate about mobilizing the Jewish community to create social change,” Ms. Brickman said. “He believes that everyone has something to contribute to the community initiatives and is constantly encouraging people to voice their opinions and become actively involved. Ari brings a tireless enthusiasm for social justice and a deep respect for Torah ideals to the initiatives – and his optimism and positive energy are contagious!”

It is that tireless enthusiasm that keeps Ari Hart afloat while working under pressure for Uri L’Tzedek. The amount of work he’s doing seems endless. “We’re launching a non-profit, doing visioning, fundraising, making copies, teaching, organizing, buying food for events, programming and leadership, following up with people, doing a lot of one-on-ones with people, putting stuff together,” Mr. Hart said. “And then…yeshiva, of course. It’s basically two full-time jobs.” (Hart squeezed this interview in between a call to Israel, an Uri L’Tzedek meeting and the little sleep he’s getting at night.)

Mr. Hart said learning to say no to things has been a real challenge for him. “I struggle with wanting to do a lot and just not being able to do it all, managing commitments and managing not burning out, following through with everything I want to do. Sometimes there are a million ideas and I can’t do it all,” Mr. Hart said. “I wish I just had a month to process everything that’s happened in the last two years since I moved to New York.”

It doesn’t look like Mr. Hart will get that break any time soon. Not as long as Uri L’Tzedek works to “to improve tenants’ rights, the local environment, and education in surrounding public schools, availability of quality health care and the value of neighborhood apartments in Washington Heights,” Ms. Brickman said. “[All which] will ultimately only enhance the lives of each of us in the Jewish community by providing a cleaner, safer, and friendlier neighborhood.”

In the end, Ari Hart’s work has made Washington Heights a much smaller place. And he will continue working to keep it that way. Local churches, synagogues and other organizations that once ignored each other now call on each other as friends. Carlos Cepeda of FYI left me with his final thoughts on Ari’s community building activities.

Mr. Cepeda said, “I remember a poem that goes something like this…. In a thousand years from now, it won’t matter what house I have or the car that I drive or how much money I have in the bank. All that’s going to matter is the difference I made in my community. I think that’s the message Ari and his organization live by.”