The Mobile Area Jewish Federation held its annual community celebration this week, presenting its top honor for lifelong service to a local educator and volunteer while also recognizing U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions with a new award for his support of Israel.
The federation’s Devorah Award, given each year to a Mobile woman for sustained leadership in Jewish community life, went to a longtime teacher in the Mobile Public School system who has spent decades volunteering with local and national organizations. Her son, speaking from New York, said her approach to community work has always centered on personal relationships and treating each person she encounters with genuine respect.
In accepting the award, the honoree traced her commitment to activism back to her childhood in a small Jewish community in West Virginia, where she said dinner-table conversations with visiting student rabbis often turned to civil rights and the obligations of Jewish tradition to confront injustice. She described anti-Semitism, bullying and discrimination based on race, religion or sexual orientation as forms of the same underlying problem: the denial of basic freedom and dignity.
Over the years, the honoree has helped lead the Mobile Jewish Film Festival, served on the federation’s board, co-founded a local chapter of the National Conference for Community and Justice, sat on the Alabama Holocaust Commission and volunteered with a regional center devoted to Holocaust and human rights education. She also created and supervised, for five years, a federation program that brought young Israelis to live and work in Mobile.
A past recipient of the Devorah Award, who introduced this year’s honoree, described her as someone unwilling to look away from injustice even when it would be easier to do so. The award itself is named for the biblical judge Devorah, remembered as the only woman given supreme authority over Israel by the consent of her people.
The federation also used the event to present its inaugural Yedid L’Yisrael, or “Friend of Israel,” award to Sessions, honoring what organizers described as steadfast Senate support for the country. A former federation president told the senator the local Jewish community appreciated his record of sponsoring or co-sponsoring more than twenty bills and resolutions backing Israel, along with numerous roll-call votes supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship. Sessions received a rose sculpted from the remnants of a rocket fired into Israeli territory.
Accepting the honor, Sessions told the gathering that ongoing conflict in the Middle East reflected a long-term, difficult problem rather than any single event, and warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would be catastrophic for the region and could prompt other nations to pursue similar weapons. The evening closed with reflections tied to the timing of the ceremony, held during the week of Passover, which several speakers connected to themes of freedom, memory and communal responsibility that run through both the holiday and the federation’s mission.