Members of the MetroWest Jewish community are being urged to join an interfaith rally on the Morristown Green, Sunday, Nov. 6, at 2:30 p.m. aimed at ending the genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

The rally is part of a national effort to renew and intensify pressure on the Bush administration and other agencies to halt the ethnic slaughter.

In the past two years, some 400,000 Darfurians have been killed by Janjaweed militiamen in western Sudan and in refugee camps across the border in Chad, with the encouragement of the Sudan’s Arab government.

According to the Save Darfur Coalition, another 3.5 million people are suffering from hunger, and 2.5 million — many of the women and girls victims of rape — have been displaced due to the violence.

A key organizer of the rally, Sue Rosenthal, chair of the Morris County Human Relations Commission and past chair of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, linked the rally’s themes to the Holocaust.

“For so many years, people just sat by and did nothing while six million of our kiddushim perished. The Sudanese people who are being murdered for no reason at all are not Jewish, but they are starving to death, and no one is standing up and saying, ‘This is wrong. Never again.’

“How many times as Jews in the last 65 years have we said ‘Never again,’ and the genocides continued?” she said.

The effort in Morris County is part of a national outreach by Jewish groups to focus concern on Darfur.

Rosenthal told NJ Jewish News that the centerpiece of the Morristown rally will be a march that will circle the town’s green seven times, stopping each time to blow the shofar. The rite will emulate Joshua’s “marching around the city of Jericho seven times and blowing the shofar until the walls came down.”

Rosenthal’s rabbi, Joel Soffin of Temple Shalom in Succasunna, a rally sponsor, said the rally organizers hope the event will break through the “walls of indifference.”

“Some have the sense that the American government isn’t doing more because the leadership has the feeling that we don’t care,” said Soffin. “There needs to be a loud cry. If we gather in Morristown and blow loudly enough on the shofar, then maybe that message will be heard in Washington. There might be a change of a heart and a change of policy.”

Lori Price Abrams, director of the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey, a sponsor of the rally, called for action beyond the march. “We need to make some demands on our own government to follow through on the early claims they made that this is a genocide,” she said. President Bush referred to the slaughter in Darfur as “genocide” as recently as June 1.

Price Abrams is heading UJC of MetroWest federation’s effort in the battle to stop the genocide in the African region. “The Darfur issue is sadly getting worse, not better, so every opportunity we have to lend our name to that of other community groups is a really important opportunity to keep the issue alive,” she said. “There are still so many people who aren’t closely following it; there are so many things that demand our attention — tragedies like the natural disasters we’ve been dealing with — it is a more challenging time to keep a focus on this human-made tragedy.

“We’re talking about a genocide,” said Price Abrams. It wasn’t a disaster like “the rains falling down or an earthquake happening. It is something that we can, in theory, do something about.”