Arabs, Jews to travel to Poland together
Special delegation of Jewish, Arab, Druze, Bedouin and Christian students to visit concentration camps, learn about 'the other.' 'We're leaving as a united group of friends,' one student says
A unique group consisting of 220 Jewish, Arab, Druze, Bedouin and Christians teenagers is expected to visit Nazi concentration camps in Poland later this month.
The participants are all students at Amal high schools across Israel. The trip will be held under the banner, "We are all part of same human fabric."
Amal Group Director Shimon Cohen wrote a letter to the students, asking them to bring with them on their journey not just food and clothing but also patience, openness and attentiveness.
The group decided to allow the students to experience both the suffering the Jewish people have gone through and the pain caused to other nations and religions in an attempt to acknowledge "the other". 
Many Amal schools are taking part in the special mission, including those in Shefaram, Rahat, Dimona, Hadera, Ofakim, and Kiryat Malakhi. Each student will pay roughly NIS 5,000 ($1,360) for the trip, part of which will be subsidized by Amal and the Education Ministry.
Throughout their visit, the students will be divided into integrated groups consisting of Arab, Hebrew and English speakers.
One big united group
In preparation for their trip the students participated in a series of meetings aimed at connecting the different worlds they all come from.
"The first few meetings were awkward for them due to cultural differences, and the fact that not all of them speak Hebrew," the project manager said. According to her, the students eventually learned to get to know one another.
Dudu Glam, a student from Kiryat Malakhi, said all teenagers love the same things and noted they all quickly "became Facebook friends." He added: "You could say we're going on this trip as one big and united group of friends."
Munir Saad, principal of Shefaram's technological high school, said that at first the students who signed up for the trip thought of it as an opportunity to take a vacation from school, but they ended up learning a lot about the Holocaust.
"As a minority living in Israel they identified with the Jewish suffering and learned that only by getting to know each other could we truly coexist," Saad said.
One of the Arab students in the group mentioned: "At first I wasn't interested in learning about the Holocaust, I only wanted to go abroad. However once we go to know the Jewish guys, we realized we're all the same and maybe by us learning about the Holocaust the Jews can learn about our hardships in the State of Israel."
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