Tuesday, January 1, 2008 – Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam
Neve Shalom means ‘oasis of peace.’ It is a village located near Latrun the site of a famous battle of the 1948 Independence War, and is actually built upon a site of the abandoned Arab village Deir Yassin. (Read history of the pre-independence days to learn of the significance of that name.) Neve Shalom started in 1979 as an experiment in communal living of Arabs and Jews in Israel. Intended to be a community of 150 families, it still has only about 50 residents, one-third of whom work in the community (see below), and the other two-thirds work in conventional jobs in near-by cities.
Neve Shalom’s primary work has been on Jewish-Arab cooperation and coexistence, through programs for high school and adult populations in Israel. The subjects range from language and holiday celebrations, and similar cross-cultural subjects, to conflict resolution and management of problems that appear in the diverse religious populations of Israel.
This visit proved to be quite controversial, for our presenter (a resident of the community since 1984) suggested strongly, and then confirmed definitely through the Q and A, that he would like there to be a completely secular society in Israel, that there should be no distinctions between Jew, Christian, and Muslim. The main question in our group, especially after hearing from Colonel Gruber earlier in the day, was why this Neve Shalom presenter was willing to remain in Israel, or what made it a special place to be in any case? Why did he not live in America?
This set of questions gave us much food for thought as we made our way to Tel-Aviv, the significant metropolis of Israel.
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