In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s destruction in the Southeastern U.S. two weeks ago, the initial wave of disaster relief came in the form of first responders doing search and rescue, assessing damage, and bringing in much-needed food, water, and other supplies.
While that work continues in hard-hit places like Asheville, N.C., the next phase of disaster aid is also kicking into gear: Volunteers coming to help clean up the aftermath.
That’s where Nechama, the Jewish Minnesota-founded disaster relief organization, comes in. They are organizing a six-month operation in and around Asheville, with hopes of staffing three teams of 12-20 volunteers each to fix up several properties at a time.
“We are good at mobilizing large numbers of volunteers,” said Stephan Kline, the CEO of Nechama. “We train them on what we need to do…we’re mucking and gutting out houses that got flooded. We’re taking out the debris. We’re doing brush removal. At the end of the process, we might do mold mitigation.”
Nechama often works with underserved communities: Those who are uninsured and low-income, including older adults and people with disabilities.
“Typically our clients…are not Jewish,” Kline said. “We’re doing this because we are.”
Nechama usually gets hundreds of volunteers to help with multi-month relief operations.
Nearly 1,500 people came with Nechama to Puerto Rico to assist in the aftermath of widespread hurricane damage in 2017, and around 800 volunteers worked in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.
But bringing volunteers to a disaster zone is never simple. An initial team from Nechama went to North Carolina in early October to connect with the local Jewish community and other disaster aid organizations.
Max Manasevit, director of operations at Nechama, relayed what the team found in an Oct. 1 video message on Instagram.
“Infrastructure is down, communications are down, materials in and out are severely limited, there’s very restricted road access, there’s active search and rescue,” he said.
At the time, that meant holding off on volunteer operations. “We never want to bring volunteers into an environment that is 1) unsafe and 2) a burden onto the community,” Manasevit said.
While there still isn’t running water in Asheville, as of late last week Nechama started to bring a few volunteers from surrounding communities like Charlotte and Greenville. In time, the volunteer operation will expand to include Jews from across the country.
“This is a big operation for us, and it’s seeming to come together quicker than we anticipated,” Kline said.
“In the short term, it’s much more likely that a group would come from Chapel Hill for a long weekend, rather than from San Francisco,” he said. “But at some point, there’ll be a lot of groups from different communities, including, of course, from Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
Kline noted that there’s now a direct flight from the Twin Cities to Asheville (a quick look at Google Flights shows ticket prices at $350-450 for the next few weeks).
As CEO, Kline’s role includes networking with Jewish organizations across the country to raise support and get people interested in volunteering with Nechama.
“People come to us because they find this as an outlet for their Jewish values,” he said.
Kline also sees Nechama’s work as a way to combat antisemitism. In the ideal volunteer operation, the hope is that non-Jews get to know Jewish volunteers and, as a result, set aside antisemitic prejudice.
But the aftermath of Hurricane Helene has been a wake-up call that such a passive approach to addressing antisemitism is no longer enough.
Antisemitism has been front and center in a storm of conspiracy theories claiming, among many things, that Jews in the U.S. government created Hurricane Helene, and that Jews in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are preventing disaster relief while using the destruction as a pretense for seizing private property.
FEMA now has an official page responding to such conspiracy theories amid worries that they will get in the way of relief efforts.
The conspiracy theories have come with threats of violence against aid workers. One man, armed with an assault rifle, was recently arrested for threats in North Carolina that led to some FEMA workers being temporarily evacuated.
“These conspiracies, rooted in centuries-old tropes of Jewish omnipotence, control over finances, and greed, are not only baseless but dangerous,” said a letter from Nechama to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press.
“We hope that our presence and actions can help dispel the antisemitic theories that seem to be resurfacing at an alarming rate.”
The letter is a sign that Nechama plans to be more vocal about its work.
“Instead of somewhat passively doing those good deeds and hoping for the ripple effect to make a difference, we’re going to lean into the community relations aspect of this,” said Kline.
He’s hoping to “connect with influencers in [disaster-hit areas], bring people to the service sites, that kind of thing – which is not something we’ve typically done in the past.”
Still, Kline doesn’t think these conspiracy theories will endanger volunteers, even as, just like every other Jewish organization, Nechama is always concerned with potential threats against Jews.
“We run into hostile people – but when you’re doing a good thing for that hostile person or their neighbor, it’s harder for them to think bad things about the Jewish people,” he said.
The amped up public relations is part of a larger evolution that Nechama is going through. Kline, director of operations Max Manasevit, director of development and communications Shlomo Rozenek, and operations coordinator Thom Pegg were all hired earlier in 2024, bringing a new energy to the organization founded in 1993.
Kline wants “to do a better job of leaning into our Minnesota roots, being a more effective local player in disaster relief,” he said. “I don’t get a sense that, in recent years, we’ve done a good enough job on that.”
Nechama, while founded by Minnesota Jews and based in Minnesota, now has employees spread across the country. Just one board member is from the Twin Cities.
Kline wants to bring a schedule to Nechama’s work, where it can be more Minnesota-focused in times of need during the spring and early summer with flooding and tornadoes. Then the organization can transition back to national work on hurricanes for the rest of the year.
Both to make that schedule work, and to bring the Minnesota spirit to national work, Kline wants to organize a staple of Minnesota volunteers who are willing to respond regularly to disasters.
“It has something to do with fundraising and how we source volunteers…I think it’s a pretty important paradigm shift for the organization,” Kline said.
In the meantime, people can donate to Nechama’s work, along with signing up to volunteer either in-person or virtually with Crisis Cleanup, a system to assess and track housing damage after a storm.
Hurricane Helene resulted in over 20,000 calls to Crisis Cleanup, many of which still have not been addressed. The system helps aid organizations know where and how to deploy for disaster relief.
Around 150 people have already done the virtual volunteering after a Nechama training program. It’s another sign of the changing times: In the future, Kline hopes to expand virtual volunteering to engage even more Jews and assist more people.
“I want to figure out a whole array of virtual volunteer opportunities for people who don’t have the time or the means, or are older, or potentially too young to do a deployment,” he said.
