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Jewish, Christian students to engage in dialog
New educational program will bring Jewish and Christian students together for Bible and New Testament studies, visits to synagogues and churches. ‘Dialog with the other helps us get to know ourselves too,’ organizer explains
Tamar Sela
Jewish and Christian students in Israel will study texts from the Bible and the New Testament together, visit synagogues and churches and get to know each other through a variety of joint activities according to a new curriculum plan of five Jewish schools and five Christian educational institutions.
The Jewish schools’ teachers are currently holding a pilot for the program with their Christian counterparts, and aspire to expand the project to Muslim schools in the future. Once the school year opens, these teachers will serve as instructors in the meetings between their students.
The Jewish schools belong to the Tali (the Hebrew acronym for enriched Jewish studies) network of over 170 state (public-secular) schools and pre-schools that are committed to providing pluralistic Jewish education to Israel’s non-observant majority. The network has around 30,000 students.
The teachers participating in the program (Photo: Eva Halachmi)
The program in question, called Dialog, is the joint initiative of Tali and the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. Nava Tal, head of Tali's southern district, explained that the initiative came after Tali teachers learned that encounters and joint activities with Arab students left their students confused.
“After years of meetings, we realized that the students return very confused and embarrassed. They met children who come from a rural and very conservative society, who knew everything there was to know about Islam, while they didn’t know enough about Judaism,” she said.
“Theses meetings led us to understand that we need to concentrate on the students’ Jewish-Israeli identity, and that the encounter with the other causes you to sharpen your identity, and this is the foundation for dialog. Out of our encounter with a different culture and tradition, comes the need to deal with our tradition as well,” she added.
The project’s director, Eva Halachmi, said that the pilot, which brings together teachers and principals from both sectors, aims to create dialog between Jews and Arabs. “First of all, we build a basis of trust, interests and mutual curiosity. One of the surprises is that most of the teachers don’t know many things about themselves, and are finding things out in the course of the process.
“We found out that most of the Christians have never been to a synagogue, but also that there was a lot of ignorance among the participants not only regarding the other, but also regarding themselves.”
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