Jewish high school students from New York and Christian high school students from Berlin, Germany are joining together for the 9th Annual American-Jewish/German Youth Exchange Program in New York this week, Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum has announced. Nine years ago, Rosenbaum, secretary-general of the North American Board of Rabbis, a member of the Executive of the World Jewish Congress United States and spiritual leader of Temple Israel of Lawrence, NY, initiated the American-Jewish/German High School Youth Exchange Program in recognition of the need for American Jewry in meaningful dialogue to reach out to the people and government of Germany which is Israel’s strongest ally in Europe.
The program is a collaborative effort between the North American Board of Rabbis, the World Jewish Congress, the City of Berlin and the German Foreign Ministry, facilitated in New York by Temple Israel of Lawrence. Its honorary chairman is Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit. It came about as a result of a mission of rabbis from across the United States led by Rabbi Marc Schneier, today a World Jewish Congress vice-president, to Berlin in March 2001.
Rabbi Rosenbaum declared: “The goal of the Exchange Program is to promote understanding, sensitivity and cooperation between German and American-Jewish youth so that in partnership they may create a better world for themselves and their children in the 21st Century than we and their parents and grandparents created in the 20th Century.”
The American Jewish students will be visiting Berlin in February and staying in the homes of the students they hosted in New York. Rosenbaum said: “These young adults, by opening up their homes and their hearts to each other, will come to realize that they share similar hopes and visions for the future and come to understand that what happens to one person of faith anywhere, affects all people of faith everywhere. In this world plagued by the virus of religious extremism and violence, we are, indeed, each other’s brothers and sister’s keepers.”
