c. 1999 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II gave his blessing Wednesday (Sept. 22) to a group of young Israelis and Palestinians who are working for peace in the Middle East and told them,”God willing,”they will meet again in the Holy Land.”You know that, if God wills, I plan to go to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage tracing the stages of the history of salvation,”the 79-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff told the young people.”God willing, therefore, we shall have the chance to meet again on your own soil.” The peace delegation was made up of Jews, Roman Catholics and Muslims, ages 10 to 17. It included the grandson of Holocaust victims and the son of a Palestinian who spent 14 years in an Israeli prison but is now a peace activist.
The six young people came to the Vatican under the auspices of the Tel Aviv-based Peres Center for Peace to present the pope with a”peace calendar”marking the months and holy days of the three religions in Hebrew, English and Arabic.”The pope is coming to the Holy Land in March, and this is supposed to be a sort of prelude to his visit,”Amit Gvaryau, 17, of Rehovot told a news conference at Vatican Radio after attending the pope’s weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
The Vatican has said it is attempting to arrange a series of papal pilgrimages to Old and New Testament sites in Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria and Greece to mark the start of the third millennium of Christianity.
The trips are expected to start with a controversial visit in early December to Ur of the Chaldees in Iraq, birthplace of the patriarch Abraham. Both the U.S. and British governments strongly oppose the trip, fearing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would use it to try to legitimize his regime.
Israeli and church officials have been saying for months the pope will travel to Israel in March, but there has been no official announcement from the Vatican.
The”peace calendar,”illustrated with brightly colored paintings by children from five grade schools in Israel and areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, was sponsored by the Peres Center, the Palestinian Ministry of Education and UNESCO. The center plans to use the proceeds from its sale to support a network of”peace computer centers”to link young people in the Palestinian Authority area, Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
Funding also came from the governments of Norway, Germany, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, foundations and three international business companies, which donated $100,000 each. The center hopes multinational businesses also will be major customers for the calendar.
Peera Chodorov, director of the center’s Israel Department, said the calendar will go on sale next month at the center and through UNESCO.
The young people had a brief formal meeting with the pope at the general audience and were not able to speak to him, but they said they were excited by the encounter.”It was a very moving gesture that the pope had something to say about peace,”Gvaryau said. All Gvaryau’s grandparents died in the World War II Holocaust, and his uncle was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.”It was a big step for us and for him too. We’re all waiting for him to come in March, and we’re excited,”said Reem Shadid, a 15-year-old Muslim girl from the West Bank city of Hebron. The center said in brief biographies of the young people that Shadid’s father, an economist, studied in the United States during the 1960s and was influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”We can get together despite our different religions and cultures,”said Antwan Ad-Saca, 15, a Catholic who lives in Bethlehem.
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The three younger children in the group _ Fahdi Ajrami, 13, of Gaza, a Muslim; Serene Abed Rabba, 11, of Beit-Jallah, a Catholic; and Yuval Kaminchik, 10, of Modi’in, a Jew _ painted pictures included in the calendar.
Ajrami’s father was imprisoned for his activities as a member of the hard-line Palestine Liberation Front before Ajrami was born, but later founded the Palestine Movement for Change and Peace in Gaza in 1994. The boy’s uncle was killed in the Intifada.
The Peres Center, established in 1997, is named after Israel’s minister for regional cooperation, Shimon Peres, who was a key figure in the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo accords. Its Youth Peace Council is writing a joint Israeli-Palestinian history of their shared homeland.
The 20 council members talk”even about painful subjects,”Gvaryau said. He said they had visited a Palestinian refugee camp and would also visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to Holocaust victims.”The real purpose is to get Israeli and Palestinian children to sit down and talk to each other,”he said.”We’re trying to tell people that we’re here. We are meeting. It’s not impossible, and it’s not hard,”Shadid said.
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