Ruth Messinger, President, American Jewish World Service: The simplest answer is that everybody should care. There have been a number of genocides in the past 60 years since

the Holocaust.

We’ve lived through Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, South Sudan, and now Darfur, and I think the world is gradually waking up to the fact that genocide is a problem of immense evil for which there’s not full understanding or predictability. But if there’s going to be any meaning to the concept of “never again,” it’s clear that people have got to organise politically, ideally to predict genocides and stop them before they start.

So, a big piece of this is simply a humanitarian or a human responsibility. The Jewish community has a particular interest in the phenomenon of genocide and knows not only what genocide means but, perhaps more strikingly, knows the danger of silence from the international community in the face of this kind of evil.

What we’re looking for the Jewish community to do is to be present at the rallies to be organised in Washington and also to share the story of what’s happening in Darfur broadly in their communities, to be involved in the Web-based electronic postcard, “Million Voices For Darfur” campaign, to continue to read up on the issue, and to arrange for themselves or other people to speak about this crisis in the various parts of the Jewish community, from congregations to organisations to schools.