A global Jewish educational center based in Jerusalem hosted Muslim, Christian and Jewish community leaders this week, seeking to bring together moderate religious figures in a push for coexistence.
Wednesday’s night meeting, titled Bridges of Light, was held at Aish in the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Today we stand in a world in which there is still much hatred, danger and war,” Rabbi Daniel Rowe of Aish said in his welcoming remarks. “At the same time, whilst we let extremists use religious texts on each side, the mainstream diplomatic approach is to call for secular solutions. But perhaps it is time for people of faith on each side to step forward and play a role.”
The event, which was also attended by foreign diplomats, was held in partnership with the Ohr Torah Interfaith Center and the Interfaith Encounter Association. It waded into political questions that are not normally part of Aish’s outreach efforts.
“We need to believe in the sanctity of life and not the sanctity of rocks and places,” said Hajj Mohamed Aabidou, president of the Center for Tolerance and Religious Dialogue in Rabat, Morocco.
“As a human being you need to feel the pain of the other,” said Palestinian activist Samer Sinijlawi, a proponent of the two-state solution who recently paid a condolence call to freed hostage Yarden Bibas, whose wife and two sons, aged 4 and nine months, were murdered by terrorists in Gaza. “I felt the need to apologize on behalf of my people; we should be able to open our eyes,” Sinijlawi said.
“The most important thing is dialogue,” said Sheikh Yunus Amashe from Isfiya, a Druze village on Mount Carmel, near Haifa. “We should look for what connects us and not what separates us.”
“It is impossible to understand Christianity if we do not know that it has Jewish roots,” said Professor Christophe Rico, dean of Polis—The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities.
“Religion is a powerful override switch which can be used as a cause for good or evil,” said Rowe.
The rabbi, who himself visited the Ziyadnes, a Bedouin family whose father and son were killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, suggested in a panel discussion that due to the reality on the ground, not all places in the biblical heartland holy to Judaism necessarily needed to be part of Israel.
“[This] was an opportunity to hold a dialogue and to come under one roof, for people who don’t always get that chance,” said Aish CEO Rabbi Steven Burg. “It is important that we keep the lines of communication in all parts of Israeli society open so that our communities throughout Israel can live in peace.”