The plan nobody wants to use

The pamphlets on shule seats on the High Holy Days are not, in themselves, dramatic. A logo, a few lines, a website address. Behind them sit eleven organisations that have spent the winter working out, in considerable detail, exactly who does what if something goes badly wrong.

The Jewish Community Crisis Management Alliance brings together C Care, the CSG, Chevra Hatzolah Melbourne, Congregation Adass Israel, JCCM, the JCCV, Jewish Care, Melbourne Chevra Kadisha, Progressive Judaism Victoria, the Rabbinical Council of Victoria and Zionism Victoria.

JCCM, a division of CSG Victoria, coordinates the whole thing. Every member keeps running its own operation exactly as before – the alliance connects them rather than absorbing them.

It came together in mid-May, quietly, and is going public now.

CSG Victoria chief executive Justin Kagan describes the approach as “all-hazards”, which is emergency management jargon for not assuming you know what the emergency will be. The immediate spur, though, was Bondi.

“We’re definitely far more prepared than we would have been pre-Bondi, but that’s not to say we’re where we want to be,” Kagan said. “This is a constant process of improving all the time.”

The method was straightforward enough. The alliance learned from what the Sydney community went through, held it up against Melbourne’s existing plans, and looked for the gaps. Then it set about filling them.

Asked the question everyone asks – could it happen here – Kagan doesn’t pretend to know.

“We are preparing for every eventuality. We never know what’s going to happen. Our responsibility is to be prepared.”

Nobody needed convincing to join up.

“I can confidently say that every single organisation that we asked to be a part of it jumped at the opportunity,” Kagan said.

“We are not letting ego or politics get in the way. It is purely about what is best for our community.”

Who does what

Chevra Hatzolah Melbourne takes the immediate emergency medical response. General manager Josh Wonder points out that this is not new territory for them: responders trained with United Hatzalah in Israel in mass casualty response in 2015, and the organisation ran a full mass casualty scenario with all its Melbourne responders a few years ago.

“We’ve always been ready for mass casualty events, or community crisis events,” Wonder said. “We’ve had plans for years. But the feedback that we all got from Bondi was that ability to synchronise all the services together and have a plan around that. I think that’s the aim of this alliance – we all do a really good job, but it’s about coordinating those services together when something happens.”

What Hatzolah would be doing on the day depends entirely on what the day brings.

“It’s not just about terrorism, it’s about any community crisis, really,” he said. “But where there’s some kind of need for an emergency medical response, we as a whole would be responsible for that.”

Jewish Care carries two streams: mental health, and emergency relief.

“Victims or family members or generally the community may be impacted by the event,” said Yoni Paluch, Jewish Care’s director of strategy and community engagement. “They’ll be able to reach out and receive the mental health support that they so desperately need.” That would come from registered clinicians on staff, supplemented by professionals brought in from elsewhere, delivered in person or online, and potentially from drop-in locations set up for the purpose.

The relief stream covers food, financial assistance, clothing and other welfare needs, coordinated by Jewish Care but drawing on C Care, the Melbourne Jewish Charity Fund and others.

The detail of what that looks like in practice comes straight from Sydney. The JCCM members went through what happened in the first 24 hours, the first 72, the first week and beyond with Jewish Care NSW, Jewish House and the NSW Board of Deputies – not just to see what the community needed, but what got in the way of providing it.

“People were without prams, without phones, without things that they needed that they had to leave on the beach or in the surrounds, and they couldn’t afford a new pram,” Paluch said. “They said we need a few hundred dollars to go and purchase a new pram. Those people shouldn’t be jumping through hoops.”

Getting clinicians into place fast was the other sticking point. Sydney is now, as Paluch put it, able to run that support as business as usual, but the early days were hard.

He is emphatic about why the mental health piece has to be immediate rather than eventual.

“As we learnt from a lot of our friends in Israel, the trauma and the PTSD often comes from not addressing some of those mental health needs as we’re actually dealing with and processing the event that occurred,” he said. “That’s critically important immediately, but then also in the longer term, so that people have access without worrying about where am I going to find it, how can I pay for it, I can’t afford it. We want to make it available immediately.”

C Care’s role is emergency relief, and its chief executive and co-founder Rabbi Shlomo Nathanson notes that the organisation is already doing the work every week of the year, feeding more than 2500 people, moving eight to ten tonnes of food, running more than 250 volunteers.

“In a crisis, chas veshalom, that infrastructure and those relationships become even more critical, so our job is making sure it’s ready to scale,” he said.

That has meant an unglamorous piece of accounting C Care calls its business-as-usual baseline: volunteer capacity, food stores, kitchen output, distribution.

“We know exactly what we can commit during an emergency without disrupting support to our existing, often more vulnerable, clients,” Nathanson said. “Beyond that baseline, we’re mapping the extra capacity we could bring to bear for others in the community facing unexpected hardship during a crisis.”

The JCCV is the lead partner on communications, and its chief executive Naomi Levin makes the point that a crisis need not involve an attack at all.

“Crisis preparedness is important for any community, including our Jewish community, and crisis can come in many different shapes and sizes,” she said. “We know that the next crisis is just around the corner. When the next pandemic, natural disaster or community emergency hits, we will be better prepared to meet the needs of those impacted, thanks to the JCCM Alliance.”

Levin’s other observation is that the raw material is already there.

“We have so much expertise in our community, but also so many service providers, volunteers and helpers who can be mobilised in times of crisis. The JCCM Alliance brings Jewish community know-how, experience, expertise and enthusiasm together.”

The alphabet soup

Anyone who has spent time around Jewish communal organisations knows the reputation: overlapping mandates, competing acronyms, the occasional turf war. Put eleven of them in a room and the question asks itself.

Paluch’s answer is that the structure has been designed to defuse exactly that problem.

“We have lead organisations, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only organisations providing that support. It just means that that’s the organisations coordinating that support,” he said. “We need to leverage everyone’s expertise. This is putting it in a really nice structure where everyone is able to provide what they can.”

Wonder believes says the premise is not entirely true.

“All the organisations that are involved in it have always got on. We’ve never really been into politics,” he said. “With CSG, we work together at every event that we go to. It’s more about formalising the relationships when it comes to these community crises.”

He thinks the formation of the Alliance is actually a reason for optimism among Victorian Jews.

“I think they should feel reassured,” he said. “The fact that we have such strong organisations in Melbourne and that we all are on the same page — I think it’s something that’s lacking in a lot of other communities around the world. It shouldn’t take a tragedy to align us like that. But it’s a really nice thing that you can come together and we can all sit there and just look at it from the perspective of what’s better for the community.”

Paluch said no one enjoys having to do this, but it’s necessary.

“I hope we never ever have to engage JCCM, but it would be remiss of us not to plan. It’s not a fun activity to do, and it’s highlighting areas of need within the community. But it’s a critical piece of work that we need to do.”

The High Holy Days campaign – posters, stickers, postcards – exists to make the coordination visible. Kagan’s framing of what he wants people to feel walking into shule this year is deliberately two-handed.

“Our community should always be alert to what’s going on around them, but they should be able to feel confident that they can go about living a proudly Jewish way of life,” he said.

“The Jewish community has a history of looking out for one another. We are resilient, right down to our DNA.”

More information is available here.