Paralleling international efforts to defuse a potential nuclear threat from the government of Iran, American-Jewish organizations are urgently mobilizing supporters and seeking non-Jewish allies in isolating the government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The local outreach effort arrives in New Jersey on Tuesday, Feb. 7, when Howard Kohr, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Benjamin Krasna, Israel’s deputy consul general in New York, will make a joint address at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston. Their 7:30 p.m. appearance is billed as a “special briefing” ominously titled “The Point of No Return: Iran’s Nuclear Ambition and What It Means to Israel.” The event is sponsored jointly by the temple, AIPAC, and the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

Elsewhere in the state, the regional chapter of the American Jewish Committee is gathering signatures from top leaders on a petition meant to pressure governments to isolate and ostracize Iran.

AJC is doing “a full-court press,” said Allyson Gall, executive director of the AJC’s NJ region. “We’re going to be asking leaders to sign on to declarations and ads that say it is time for the world to address Iran. The international community really has to act now. It can’t pretend any more that this isn’t a serious threat. We are trying to ratchet up awareness in the community. If we want to do this without force, we have to get the Iranians to wake up. We have to rattle their cages. We’ve got to stop Iran now from the path that it’s taking and draw attention to this immediate threat.”

A similar call is being heard throughout the American-Jewish community. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said it is receiving “encouraging responses from governments around the world in reply to our request” that nations shun “any official contact with President Ahmadinejad.”

In Washington, AIPAC declared that “Iran must be referred to the UN Security Council now, before time runs out for the international community to prevent the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism from developing nuclear weapons.”

AJC’s grassroots campaign is intended to reach beyond the Jewish community to enlist office holders, religious leaders, community organizations, and the antiwar movement to pressure governments to isolate and ostracize Iran.

The AJC’s initiative began with full-page ads headlined “Never Again?” in The New York Times and International Herald-Tribune on Jan. 27, timed to coincide with the first United Nations observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of Holocaust victims, and the date Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.

Gall’s deputy, Ferne Hassan, the AJC’s NJ area assistant director, who is coordinating the committee’s local efforts, will oversee the petition drive.

“This is where we have the opportunity to reach out to all the people we’ve built relationships with, independently or in coalitions, so that we can apprise them of who this man Ahmadinejad is and what his intentions are,” said Hassan.

“We have to paint a picture of him beyond a Jewish prism. We need to establish him as someone who wants to bring his country back to the seventh century. We want to let people know just how dangerous he is and what he is saying and what he can potentially do.

“It is absolutely a broader issue than just his threat to Israel,” said Hassan. “This man has visions beyond Israel. Israel is just an eyelash that he has to get out of his eye, and then he goes on to bigger and better things.”

Insisting that her organization “is not calling for military action at all,” Hassan said, “It is important to stop people like him in their tracks. We want to garner as much support as possible, to get better heads together to understand the seriousness of the situation. Something has to be done.”

Acknowledging that Israel already has nuclear weapons, Hassan said, “Israel has never in its history exemplified itself as a country going out to conquer.”

Gall agreed.

“If any country in the world ever needed nukes, Israel needs them. But I hope they will never use them,” she said.

But a potential ally in the state’s antiwar movement said that defusing the Iranian nuclear threat will be successful only if Israel gives up its nuclear weapons.

“Obviously, this man in Iran has to be dealt with,” said Madelyn Hoffman, executive director of NJ Peace Action, who lived and studied in Israel.

“We need to step back and look at the big picture,” she told NJJN. “What is going to be the best way without lighting the powder keg? As a peace movement, we would like everyone to disarm, and we would like the nuclear powers under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to do what they were supposed to do, which was to take genuine steps to disarm.”

Insisting there is time for negotiations with Iran before it develops a nuclear weapons capability, Hoffman said, “A policy that doesn’t include a strategy for eliminating nuclear weapons in the region ultimately is not going to be helpful.”

But a fellow peace activist, Paul Surovell, who chairs South Mountain Peace Action in Maplewood, stands in partial disagreement with Hoffman.

“It is understandable that Israel has nuclear weapons and that India and Pakistan have them and that the United States has them,” he told NJJN. “I would never want to approve of a country developing nuclear weapons, but the motivation for developing them is generally one of self-defense.

“What is motivating Iran is not Israel’s nuclear weapons but the threat of an American invasion, and if that threat is removed, then I think Iran’s threat of developing nuclear weapons will be diminished.”