Liz Kaplan is a Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. She is a graduate of Williams College.

As a long-time AIDS activist, I am extraordinarily proud to belong to (and work for) a denomination with such an impressive record on the disease UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called “the greatest challenge of our generation.”

As early as 1985, the Reform Movement responded to the emerging AIDS crisis in North America, heeded Judaism’s teaching to offer healing and give comfort to the sick, and called upon the governments of the United States and Canada to prohibit discrimination against people with AIDS and their families. Our community then reiterated and expanded this call in 1987, with a lengthy and detailed resolution addressing everything from AIDS testing and education to the care of those with AIDS and expedited research into treatment possibilities. In the following decades, we also addressed the need to respond to AIDS in the context of women’s health (1993), the exploding epidemic in Africa (1999), and several other issues. Browsing the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ list of resolutions, I was especially encouraged to find that our rabbis have even endorsed the expansion of needle-exchange programs, noting that “we do not stand idly by the blood of neighbors who suffer simply because they are [drug] addicts” (2001). And we have followed up on these resolutions with actions on the congregational level and at the RAC.

Yet we – and everyone else on the planet who has lent a hand in the global attempt to beat back the AIDS epidemic or to lessen its tragic impact – have so much more to do. As Abigail Zucker writes in an article in the New York Times today, science has come a long way, but living with HIV is still no picnic (this article is a great read, by the way, for anyone who has never known a person living with the virus).

Furthermore, while those in the United States and other developed nations have ever-increasing chances at a happy, healthy life with HIV, most of the world lags terribly behind. According to a recent column by Nicholas Kristof, if the epidemic continues to progress at its current rate, the total death toll from AIDS will be 70 million by 2020, yet 90 percent of those currently infected still do not know it. And beyond the statistics are the images of individual lives and even entire communities rendered unrecognizable from the scourge of AIDS. In 2003, I had the opportunity to spend five weeks observing and assisting in a public hospital in Botswana, where 24 percent or more of the adult population is infected with HIV. I will never forget the day I watched one doctor and one nurse see about 20 AIDS patients in just a few hours; they put me to work weighing patients and labeling test tubes to make the visits go even faster. Nor will I forget the patient who was dying of both tuberculosis and AIDS (not an uncommon occurrence in the developing world, and in many cases a speedy death sentence), who was too weak to talk and whose body was covered with sores. Or the young woman who I have never met, but whose story I show in a video for L’Taken participants – she is 15, was raped as a small child, and is now HIV-positive, living in a town in Tanzania where treatment is completely unavailable.

Last week, at the 2006 High Level Meeting on AIDS, the UN General Assembly adopted a nonbinding declaration that reaffirms commitments made in 2001 to address both medical and non-medical aspects of the epidemic. Among other things, the document calls on countries to support the rights of women and girls so that they can be empowered to protect themselves, to use scientifically documented prevention strategies (including condoms), to make clean needles accessible to drug users, and to take steps to provide universal access to prevention programs, care and antiretroviral drugs.

Like our Reform Movement resolutions, the recent UN declaration is an encouraging step, but the world needs to follow up with action. And after 25 years of AIDS, the time for this action is past due.