Our History

Our committee grew out of the work of The Jewish Center, which has a seventy-five year history of housing and supporting refugees in Princeton.   In 2015, members from The Jewish Center, Princeton United Methodist Church, and Princeton Friends Meeting established The Jewish Center's Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Committee. 

We worked with Church World Service to resettle an Ahmadi Muslim refugee family from Pakistan. Once that family moved on, our committee was asked to support a domestic violence survivor from Africa who was living in Princeton with her with two young children. We did this for three years. In 2016 we affiliated with Interfaith-RISE, a newly-formed Refugee Resettlement agency in Highland Park (an affiliate office of USCRI recognized by the Department of State) and in 2018 we began resettling a Christian Pakistani family in Princeton. We also worked with two families from Afghanistan who came with Special Immigrant Visas because the fathers worked with the US Military, an Eritrean refugee woman and a Salvadoran refugee family.  We helped a Pakistani man, a Tibetan woman and a Syrian family seeking asylum in the US.  Since 2021 we've welcomed twenty Afghan, four Ukrainian, five Syrian and two Pakistani households, as well as one each from Uganda, Cameroon and Eritrea for a total of 127 individual Refugees and Asylum-seekers.

We build on a strong volunteer base, hard won competencies, and a history of success in helping refugees establish themselves in their new homes and become self-sufficient.