Jerusalem, Israel- Students encountered “the other” through interfaith dialogue by studying sacred texts together with the help of Interfaith Encounter Association MCC.

The IEA MCC was asked by the Ministry of Education to lead a session of interfaith encounter for 200 Jewish, Muslim and Christian secondary school students of the Students’ Parliament of the Ministry’s central region in February.

They started with brief introductions about the work IEA is doing and showing a documentary about the work of IEA’s school project in Karmiel and Majd el-Krum.

Students then divided into 20 circles of ten and started studying three pages of Jewish texts of Maimonides. Rabbi Yosef Karo, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rabbi Kook assisted this process. The students also studied texts from the Koran and Hadith and Christian texts from the New Testament and Nostra Aetate.

Yehuda Stolov, Executive Director of IEA, said the texts were original texts and challenging for the students, but they continued to study them and had very good discussions about them and drew personal lesson fro their own life.

The session ended with a representative of each group who shared with the plenary highlights from the discussion in their group.