Education Israel Project #1520

Training 80 Youth Encounter Leaders

by Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA)

Project Report | Nov 5, 2015
Tel Aviv Interfaith Encounter group resumes

By Dr. Yehuda Stolov | Executive Director

Some of the people in the first encounter

On Wednesday, October 21^st, the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa Interfaith Encounter group resumed its activity after 9 years of being inactive. It was important for us to resume the group especially in the hard days the Holy land is going through as a sign of hope and positive contribution for a better future. Due to various constrains potential participants were invited only two days before the encounter, which resulted in more than half of them unable to join this time. Still, we were a very diverse group, including, among others, air-condition technician, Ph.D. candidate in Mathematics and music producer.

We began with an in-depth round of introduction in which each of us introduced himself and shared key points in his life story. Each of us also told the others how he came to the group and stressed the significance of this type of dialogue in the building of relations between communities.

Not surprisingly the conversation also touched on the current "situation" and focused on suggesting reasons for it – mainly bad education and fear that leads to hatred.

The intention of the group is to meet every two to three weeks. It was agreed that next time we will ask each person to present the list of values that are most important for him or her and that together we will put together a list of values that will be used as themes for the coming encounters.

The encounter took place in the office of "One in Nine" and we are grateful for the hospitality. Next encounter was scheduled for 12 November.

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Aug 17, 2015
Rabbis & Sheikhs encounter on May 5th

By Dr. Yehuda Stolov | Executive Director

The encounter took place on Tuesday and the subject was Peace in Judaism and Islam. An Italian TV crew was also present during the encounter.

During the free conversation, before the encounter began, one of the Rabbis shared an interesting discovery of his: the famous Mishnah from tractate Sanhedrin (4,5): The reason that a single person was created is to teach that if anyonewho causes a single life to be lost, it is as if he has lost a whole world, and if anyone saves a single life, it is as if he saved a whole world. These words are also mentioned in the Quraan inSurat Al-Ma'idah 32 (5, 32) as a wisdom from God to the Jews, it says : Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.

We started our conversation about peace with quotation from tractate Berachot in theGemara: Rabbi Hanan mentioned three kinds of peace: river, bird and cauldron. We tried to bring up different approaches to those three different images. For example we spoke about the free bird which travels to so many different places without limits, and the protective mother bird which uses its wings to protect its fledglings and cares for their safety. We talked about the making of the cauldron which is made out of melting all the compounds into one final product – the cauldron makes water and fire work together to create a shared target.

Another quotation that we discussed came from Rabbi Nahman of Breslav (Torah 80): What is the peace that which binds two opposites. As our sages, may their memory be blessed taught about the verse He who makes peace in His high places, because that is an angel of fire and that is of water, who are opposites as water puts out fire, and God makes peace between them and combine them together . One of the participants noted that the world shalom (peace in Hebrew) starts with the Hebrew letter "shin" which represents fire and ends with the letter "mem" which represents water.

Another one of the participants shared a small amusing story about Rabbi Froman, may he rest in peace, which says that: someone turned to the Rabbi to ask him about how could secular and religious live in one place. He answered with his special sense of hummer "we have an even more special phenomenon: man and woman who are living not only in one place but even under the same ceiling …"

After almost three hours, we fare-welled and everybody went home

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Jun 2, 2015
Medical Students Interfaith Encounter grop

By Dr. Yehuda Stolov | Executive Director

Conversation continues after official closing...

Some 15 participants came to this encounter. Some were new participants, and some of the participants from the previous encounter could not attend due to schedule challenges.

We opened the encounter with a round of responses on "What is most disturbing to me now", and then we had a round of sharing on "What makes me optimistic". In both rounds issues were related to politics, rifts in society, family, dialogue, culture of discussion and meeting with other groups in the country.

Then we moved to the subject on which we have focused on for the rest of the encounter: The concept of identity. We asked participants to share elements of identity and wrote them on the board. We divided the participants into three groups of 4-5, and asked them to make a list of five elements that express the identity of the group, in hierarchical order. After this activity, we returned to the circle and asked participants to view the lists that they created. We discussed the difficulties that arose from all the lists. We asked if all the members of the group agreed to the final list, and if they felt that they were required to "give up" on elements of their identity, or if there was anything on the list that does not characterize them. We continued to discuss the complexities of collective identity versus the personal identity, and the conflicts that exist between individuals/communities in the same group/country. We referred also to the importance of community identity, and the fact that personal and community identity often mix. The discussion touched general and personal experiences of different groups within the country.

In summary, we related to how the various participants in the group deal with being part of the conversation group, we raised the fact that some people feel more comfortable in the group and some less, and people express their identity in different ways as part of our group.

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