As most of you well know, Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) have never been known for having a charitable spirit, not even towards their own members because charitable acts are not encouraged by their leaders. Rather the message conveyed through this organization’s literature is that the most important thing for members to do is to spend personal time and money to convert non-JWs to their religion. They preach that after God destroys the world, suffering will be done away with so it is not necessary to relieve human suffering now.

It was while my husband and I were staff members at the JW world headquarters in New York that some momentous disasters, which touched the lives of JWs particularly here in the US, occurred. As a result, Witnesses who lived outside of the disaster areas came together to help their spiritual brothers in a large way. This activity was reported to Witness leaders in New York by their traveling representatives. Rather than stop members from assisting follow believers and come under heavy criticism, an announcement was made to the headquarter staff during lunch that the Governing Body was donating around $82,000 to help JWs in California where one particular destructive natural event had occurred. That was a milestone event which surprised and pleased the staff of 4,000 people. It came to my attention that soon after a committee at headquarters was set up which would thereafter coordinate disaster aid through branches and congregations near disaster areas. This was in the mid to late1980s and was the emergence of an appearance that this religious organization was engaged in charitable acts.

Joe and I just returned from Chicago where I was a guest speaker at the BRCI conference on September 19, 2009. The attached material, "Opening Pandora's Box" is the talk I gave. It is about our European month-long tour from last June-July. “Pandora’s Box” is a simple Greek myth which explained how bad things came to be. In one version, when Pandora opened what appeared to her to be a valuable box, she let out all the evils including hope. Is hope evil? Well, the Greeks considered hope evil, even dangerous, and its bedfellow was thought to be delusion.

In our jargon today, opening Pandora’s Box means to unwittingly unleash chaos on yourself and those around you. It was with these thoughts that I commenced one of the lectures that I gave three times in Europe this past summer.

My experiences at Bethel are in line with what Ray Franz explained in his book Crisis of Conscience that it was the “other sheep” who, over the years, did the bulk of the writing for Watch Tower literature. Of course, when Ray was in the Writing Department there were men who professed to be of the “anointed" who were doing writing. He was one of them along with Karl Klein, Lloyd Barry and Fred Franz. I don’t know if Dunlap or Reinhart Lingstat, both who collaborated on the Aid book, were of the anointed.

Frances Pollini was the middle-aged woman of Italian descent who  conducted a home Bible study with me and my mother in the fall of 1953.  Connie Grazzuti introduced the Watch Tower religion to Frances Pollini, an ardent Catholic who changed her religion to become an ardent Jehovah’s Witness. A year before Frances met us, she moved from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, NY, where Connie also lived, to East Meadow, Long Island, NY.

In 1998, I completely severed my association with Jehovah's Witnesses. However, it wasn't until 2004 that I heard the details from my mother, two years before her death at age 91, of how the Watch Tower organization’s teachings significantly altered her Polish Catholic father's life-course causing him to end up an excommunicated Catholic in Poland although he never became a Watch Tower follower.