News
For the Sake of Peace
A group of 300 people, made up of Jews and Arabs from Israel and Palestinians, will visit the Museum on May 27-28. They will be joined in Oświęcim by a group of 200 people, mostly Jews and Muslims, from France.
Jews, Muslims, Christians, and people with no religious affiliation are taking part in the visit. The organizers hope that a meeting of this kind at the site of the Auschwitz death camp will contribute to a change in viewpoints and more openness to others.
The trip is organized by the Memory for Peace association, which works in Israel and France, and the spiritual father of the effort is its chairman, Greek-Catholic archimandrite Emil Shoufani of Galilee, who is also director of the Al-Mutran (St. Joseph's) secondary school in Nazareth. Father Shoufani, a widely published writer who has been involved in the interfaith dialogue for some time, defines himself as a Palestinian by birth, a Catholic by faith, and an Israeli by nationality.
Two years ago, Shoufani received the Mount Zion Foundation medal, which has been awarded for almost twenty years to persons who are active in overcoming prejudice in Christian-Jewish relations or who have distinguished themselves in the dialogue among the three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Shoufani says that the preparations (consisting of a series of seminars) were more important than the trip itself. "This idea was born out of the realization that Israeli Arabs and Jews are growing apart as a result of the conflict and events in Israel and Palestine, which have led to deep mistrust. Each side wants to have a monopoly on being right. This is an endless story and it is making dialogue between them impossible."
"The existence of the Jewish people in this country, in the Middle East and everywhere in the world, is still deeply marked by the memory of the Shoah. Jews still feel a fear of persecution and the Intifada has only made things worse. I felt that we had to go back to dialogue and look at it from this side. This trip is not a proposal for any kind of social contract, peace treaty, or way of resolving the conflict. It is only a suggestion that we should understand the reaction of the Jews: they feel physically endangered, and they react," says Father Shoufani.
Shoufani's initiative has met with a mixed reception in the Arab world. The former spokesman for the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, Dr. Attallah Hanna, put forward a counter-suggestion: dozens of Palestinians, Muslims, and Christians should visit the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon at the same time that Shoufani and his group are visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, "to send a signal to the world that the real tragedy is what is happening to the Palestinian people." Hanna said that "it would be better if anyone who wanted to understand the suffering of the Jews first listened to the pain of their own nation and its suffering in the shadow of occupation."
Israel's population of six million includes 800,000 Arabs. Some 85% of them are Muslims, and 15%--approximately 120,000—are Christians who belong to the Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, and other churches. About five million Muslims, half of them foreigners, live in France.
According to Marcello Pezetti, the Italian historian from the Center for Jewish Documentation in Milan who is historical consultant for the project and helped arrange details of the visit to the Museum, the world media are interested, with crews from CNN and AL-Jazeera planning to file reports on the visit to Auschwitz.