Beauty, Modesty & Clothing and General Assembly - Board-Staff retreat on 12th August 2008:

On August 12th the Interfaith Encounter Association held its General Meeting at the beautiful Guest House of the Austrian Hospice, at the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem, to whom we are deeply grateful for their kind hospitality.

As we usually do, before dealing with all the business items we held a training session to enrich the on-going coordination work of our groups. This time we were happy to host Ms. Miriam Kaye, the Project Director of the Three Faiths Forum MIDDLE EAST, as another step in our growing cooperation. This cooperation is very natural as the two organization share a very similar approach, as can be seen from the following.

Miriam presented the Three Faith Forum and its approach for the use of religious sources from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Quran as a tool for the creation of a deep conversation. Following her introduction, Miriam led us through joint study and conversation around the theme of "Beauty, Modesty & Clothing", exemplifying the implementation of the approach.

We started by reading paragraphs from Genesis 24 and Proverbs 31, in Hebrew and in Arabic. Miriam first asked the Jewish participants about the meaning of the text from Genesis for them and then opened the conversation to all.

Some issues that came up were:

Rebecca is a modest woman but not insecure and when needed – she take the initiative.
The Bible first describes the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca and only then their love. One participant commented that there is no example of falling in love that leads to marriage but another said that we do have the story of Jacob and Rachel.
In Islam it is allowed for the future husband to see the face of his potential wife and he can send his mother or sister to examine other parts of the body. After their engagement they are allowed to spend time together but not alone – only with the presence of a third person.
One participant commented to that that in Judaism too exists the prohibition on a male and female to be alone together ("Yichud") and another participant commented that it is so also in India.

We then went on reading the Quranic text (7:26, 24:31 and 33:59) – in Arabic and in Hebrew. Again we started with Muslim responses and then opened for all. Some issues that came up were:

The expression "Jilbab" is interpreted by some as a cover for the whole body and by others as a cover for only the head.
The role of the modest clothing is to protect the person. For a woman it is to protect her from being hassled.
Men too have parts in the body that they have to cover.
The first text refers to all and the other two for women specifically.

The next phase was the Christian texts from Mathew 6 and Peter 3, but as the previous conversations were so vivid and interesting – we did not have time left for extensive conversation on these texts as lunch was already waiting for us.

After lunch we started our business meeting. First we marked with great sadness the death of Osnat Aram-Daphna, our coordinator of the Karmiel-Majd el-Krum Interfaith Encounter, which we just learned about. We thought about meaningful ways to honor her memory and decided to hold a study evening with her family and colleagues from the Galilee.

We then heard updates from the 10 groups that were represented in the meeting (coordinators of 4 more groups and 2 more projects either apologized or arrived after this part). We heard different reports about recent and expected developments and approved the 2006 Financial Reports that were presented to us in detail.

Finally: we held elections for the 2008-2010 Board and Audit Committee. Elected were -

To the Board:
Ms. Evelyne Savir
Dr. Shlomo Alon
Ms. Nadia Tutanji-Nuseibeh
Ms. Saheer Siam
Mr. Adnan Trabsha
Mr. Rizk Azam
(Sr. Karmela Farrugia also agreed to remain on the board as an Observer)

To the Audit Committee:
Ms. Najeeba Sirhan
Rabbi Dr. Dov maimon

We wish all of them much fruitfulness and joy in their new, or renewed, positions!!!

(Back to Reports)