A pioneering program for building friendship and mutual trust between Arabs and Jews in Israel, especially among young people, was described here at the National Interreligious Affairs Commission of the American Jewish Committee, in connection with the opening tomorrow of the Committees 73rd annual meeting which continues through Sunday at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
The intergroup program for bettering Arab-Jewish relations is known as “Interns for Peace.” It involves a group of Arabs and Jews who collaborate in providing essential social services and community projects to benefit Arab villages in the Galilee and neighboring Jewish communities coming from Arab or Islamic countries.
Reporting on the details of the project to AJCommittee leaders, Rabbi Bruce Cohen, director of Interns for Peace, announced that six Arab villages populated by Moslems, Arab Christians, and Druze had recently invited six Arab and Jewish interns from Israel and 12 North American Jewish youth to spend a year in their villages to work together in establishing health, education, youth, and other community projects. At present, there are interns and budget available to serve four villages, he said.
While living and working together in the Arab villages, the interns will also go into neighboring Jewish villages to undertake similar needed projects and to encourage cooperation and shared involvement, Cohen said. Based on successful models that are being developed between Arabs and Jews in Israel, he added; plans are now underway to create special programs for similar cooperation with Arab and Jewish counterparts in Egypt.
PRIORITY PROGRAMS OUTLINED
Concentrating on fostering active cooperation in northern Israeli rural regions, indigenous Arab and Jewish leaders have agreed on the following programs as priorities in their cooperation with Interns for Peace:
Organizing a cooperative of Arab and Jewish farmers for purchasing and sharing expensive agricultural equipment; developing industrial parks in Arab and Jewish communities the Galilee to make villages economically more self-sufficient; establishing a cooperative of Arab and Jewish women, mainly Sephardic, in producing and marketing handicrafts for domestic and foreign markets.
Also, prenatal educational programs for Arab and Jewish women; a senior citizens program for Arabs and Jews; a bicultural program involving Arab and Jewish teenage boys and a physical education program for Arab and Jewish teenage girls; summer camps for Arab and Jewish youth; a traveling folk dance/theater troupe of Arab and Jewish youth.
Significantly, Cohen noted, four Arab municipal councils in Israel have volunteered to pay for the apartments that the interns will be living in for the next two years. The Arab village and town people will be equal partners in developing the program and in helping to guide the interns during their two-year internship.
SUPPORTERS OF THE PROGRAM
Among the Arab and Jewish organizations that have given financial and other support to Interns for Peace are the Arab-Jewish Center of Givdt Haviva, the Arab-Jewish Center of the University of Haifa, two major kibbutz federations, and the Histadrut-Israeli Federation of Labor.
Prominent Israeli Arab leaders on the advisory board are the Rev. Elias Chacour of Ibillin; Munir Diob, director of the Community Center at Tamra; and Prof. Sami Mari of Hebrew University. Jewish leaders who serve on the Israeli advisory board include Rabbi Israel Goldstein; Fay Schenk, former president of Hadassah; Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, president of Bar-Ilan University; Dr. Eliezer Rafoeli, chairman of Project Renewal; and Dr. M. Bernard Resnikoff, director of the AJCommittee’s Israel Office.
Chairman of the North American Steering Committee is Matthew B. Rosenhaus, president of J.B. Williams Company. In the United States, the AJCommittee has been one of the major sponsoring groups of the Interns for Peace program. AJCommittee’s program specialist, Inge Lederer Gibel, serves on the American advisory committee.
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