Berlin is a city of many faiths and worldviews, a place of tradition, history, and vibrant creativity. Our URI and DMLB team – Sheikh Bashir, Karimah Stauch, and Marianne Horling – were in Berlin in late May to meet interfaith actors, explore partnerships, and inform people about the URI network. On the first evening, we met with members of URI Berlin CC. We had planned to come together at Alex-Treff, a reading room of the Baha’i Community in the vicinity of Berlin’s famous Alexanderplatz, where URI Europe had held a two-day-workshop for the first “Long Night of Religions” in September 2012. But, as we found it closed, we sat down at a restaurant on the other side of the road to converse with Peter Amsler and Taufiq Mempel, founders and core members of URI Berlin CC. Also with us were Gudrun Pannier and a friend of hers, both members of the Pagan network in Berlin, who are very interested in URI and in connecting with other believers. After very good conversations, the four Berliners made an appointment to meet up again in June for planning joint activities.
A new and interesting Berlin-based project is the House of One at a central place in Berlin Mitte, a house of the Abrahamic faiths on the foundation of a church which was brought down during the Communist regime in the 1960s. An architecture contest was conducted to create the house, in which all Jews, Christians and Muslims are at home in their own religious space and at the same time encounter one another and others. The conversations with Roland Stolte and Celal Findik of the House of One association were pleasant, and they were very interested in the URI network and already in touch with various URI CCs.
The next day, we participated in a one-day conference on “Islamic Feminism – the view to Germany” organized by the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation and the AMF (Action Movement of Muslim Women). We met many intelligent, vocal Muslim women fully involved in public life and standing up for equal rights – be it in German society or the Muslim community. It was inspiring for us to meet friends whom we had met first as school students, now university teachers and to see that the seeds for the full inclusion of Muslim women sown and tended with care by various pioneers are going up and developing beautifully.
On Thursday, we had an appointment with Rafiqa Younes, the officer in charge of the Jewish-Muslim Forum of the “Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin”. She welcomed us warmly and we had very interesting interfaith conversations. We informed her about URI, and she directed us to additional Berlin interfaith initiatives that will be good to contact and get into touch with. Afterwards, we visited the Jewish Museum, which is very modern, offering exhibits with multimedia components, and interesting to visit.
http://www.alextreffberlin.de/
http://house-of-one.org/de, https://www.facebook.com/HouseOfOneBerlin
http://www.hentrichhentrich.de/musik-rabbi-walter-rothschild-and-the-minyan-boys.html
https://www.fes.de/oas/portal/pls/portal/filefunctions.download/PLAKON/VERANSTALTUNG/201024/F779710715/FES_IslamFem_TagungTeil2_WEB.pdf
http://juga-projekt.de/2014/04/interreligious-peers/
http://1219.eu/
http://www.chabadberlin.de/
