12 June 2007
A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust has made a plea for tolerance at a conference in Bali, Indonesia - the world's most populous Muslim nation. At the conference, which brought together religious leaders and victims of attacks by Islamic extremists, Sol Teichman, 79, who was a teenager living in Czechoslovakia when his city was occupied first by the Hungarian army and then the Germans, said: “I hope people will learn from the past. We should try to improve life instead of destroying it." Teichman said he lost 70 family members in the Nazi death camps, including his sister, brothers and grandparents. He pointed out that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision to host a conference in December that questioned whether the Holocaust took place made him want to "push a little harder to meet Muslim leaders."
The day-long gathering on the island of Bali was also attended by high-profile moderate Muslim leaders, including former Indonesian president Abdurraham Wahid, and Hindu spiritual head Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Victims of a terrorist attack in Israel and of suicide bombings by Muslim militants on Bali in 2005 were among participants. "It's up to us to bring religion back to its original intention - to underline the importance of finding shared values," said Yenny Wahid, the daughter of the former president and herself a prominent supporter of liberal Islam. "We have to find ways to promote tolerance and understanding for mankind,“ she was quoted as saying by the ‘Jakarta Post’newspaper.
Bali is a mostly Hindu enclave in Indonesia, which has some 190 million Muslims, more than any other nation in the world. Its government is secular and most people are moderate, though a vocal militant fringe has grown louder in recent years. The conference was sponsored by the Libforall Foundation, a US-based non-governmental organization that seeks to counter Muslim extremism in the Islamic world by supporting religious moderates.
