June Walker of Rockaway, N.J., had “a week to remember” last week.
For four days last week, Walker met with heads of state and foreign ministers who were in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.
As the recently elected chairperson of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, Walker’s main concern is the survival, the welfare and the improvement of life in Israel, she said during a telephone interview from her Manhattan office.
The day that she spoke with The Chronicle, she and her delegations met with the foreign ministers of Australia, Ethiopia and Spain and the prime minister of Turkey.
Walker and other delegates urged the world leaders to resist the usual treatment of Israel in the U.N.; to move the spotlight from Israel’s “supposed human rights violations” to countries that violate the rights of women; and to support a true human rights commission to which people whose rights are being violated could turn for help.
They also encouraged the leaders to keep an eye on Iran.
Next week Walker, who completed a four-year term as national president of Hadassah in July, will speak in Milwaukee at Hadassah-Milwaukee Chapter’s Annual Donor Luncheon, slated for Wednesday, Oct. 10, 12:30 p.m., at Brynwood Country Club.
A self-described “passionate activist for Hadassah for more than 50 years,” Walker is proudest of three accomplishments with that organization.
First, is the fact that Hadassah’s Young Judea programs, its camps and hostels, have grown and “are a real factor in keeping young Jews Jewish.” “There are several programs in Israel and the camps in the U.S.,” Walker said, “and there is nothing like a Jewish camp to change a kid’s life.”
Second, Walker is also proud of the recent evolution of Hadassah College Jerusalem from a technical school for 600 students to a college offering 2,200 students degree programs in six majors and a graduate program in optometry.
“The college was my baby,” Walker said. “I was in charge.”
Walker is also proud of the development of a center for children with chronic diseases at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. The center offers everything the families of such ill children need, in one place, she said. And it is available to Arab, Christian and Jewish children.
“I am proud to be doing ‘woman’s work’— constructing dams, building hospitals, saving children, educating young adults, reforesting the land and advocating in Washington, D.C. That’s what I call the highest calling of women,” Walker is quoted as saying on the Conference of Presidents Web site.
A wife, mother and grandmother, Walker has always had a family, a career and Hadassah. She grew up in a “less religious” family, in which “one set of grandparents was religious by practice, though not philosophically, and the other side, my mother’s side, was socialist.”
When the family moved to Queens when Walker was about 12, her mother got involved with Hadassah. Later when “she was the education vice president of a little chapter in Queens and she needed a study group chair, she made me [that] chair,” she said.
Walker learned about Judaism and was “bitten by the Hadassah bug” from that time on, she said. Eventually she became president of a New Jersey chapter and chair of American affairs during the Clinton administration when health care issues were on the front burner. After that she became chair of the college and then national treasurer and president.
In her new role, Walker will head an organization that represents 50 national Jewish agencies from across the political and religious spectrums.
Though the new position is all-consuming, Walker admitted to missing the day-to-day work of Hadassah. “But to live, organizations like Hadassah must grow and change,” she said, And besides, “I haven’t really left Hadassah.”
In addition to her work for Jewish causes, Walker is a respiratory therapist and educator in that field.
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