Ari Brochin is the Rights Director at the Jerusalem African Community Center (JACC). A Philadelphia native, Ari was raised in Minyan Dorshei Derekh at Germantown Jewish Centre. He graduated from Akiba Hebrew Academy and attended Camp Ramah in the Poconos and Habonim Dror Camp Galil. After graduating from law school, he worked in human rights with Myanmar-national refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border. He spent several years interviewing refugees for possible third country resettlement with the UN Refugee Agency in Uganda and then in Tel Aviv, before moving to JACC in 2020.
The Jerusalem African Community Center (JACC) was founded in July 2014 by a group of Israelis and African asylum-seekers as an answer to the needs of the local African asylum seeker community. JACC is the only NGO dedicated to working with African asylum seekers living in Jerusalem. JACC endeavors to provide a wide spectrum of support for the approximately 3000 African asylum seekers in Jerusalem, hosting Hebrew and English lessons for adults, tutoring, social-emotional support and other activities for children, as well as various programs designed to build skills to allow asylum seekers to improve their prospects for employment. JACC’s rights program supports asylum seekers to acquire the most advantageous legal status available to them and to realize their rights under Israeli law in the fields of health and employment, among others.