Each person who went on our pilgrimage has his or her own unique story to tell. And so I will offer only my own perspective and judgments, without presuming to speak for others. Each one of us also came to this journey with our own motives and expectations. To explain mine, I need to begin with an earlier journey I took into the devotional lives of Muslims and Christians in Israel and the territories. Beginning in late 1998, I visited mosques and monasteries, learning to pray with Muslims and Christians and trying to experience something of how they encounter God in their lives. My pilgrimage into Islam and Christianity was intended to see whether religion could be a source of peace rather than divisiveness. It was also an attempt for me, as a religious Israeli Jew, to find my place in the Middle East, by connecting with the faiths of my neighbors. That journey reinforced for me the conviction that peace in the Middle East can only happen if sprituality is part of the language and sensibility of the peacemakers.
Later, when I recounted my journey before Jewish audiences, I was often confronted with the same question: Where are the Arabs who are ready to reciprocate your gesture and try to understand us? And so when I heard about the Arab initiative to organize a pilgrimage to Auschwitz – and it was essential to me that it be an Arab initiative – I realized that I finally had an answer to that question.
I learnt something new on this pilgrimage: that I could enter the Shoah and actually experience an enhanced sense of my humanity. To walk arm in arm through the crematorium building with Arabs as fellow mourners is to be liberated from what for me at least has been the most lingering trauma of the Shoah: the abandonment of the Jews by a large part of humanity. Especially in this time, when so many of us are feeling again that sense of isolation and demonization, it was a deep relief to experience the solidarity – the love – that we shared in Auschwitz.
Each person who went on our pilgrimage has his or her own unique story to tell. And so I will offer only my own perspective and judgments, without presuming to speak for others. Each one of us also came to this journey with our own motives and expectations. To explain mine, I need to begin with an earlier journey I took into the devotional lives of Muslims and Christians in Israel and the territories. Beginning in late 1998, I visited mosques and monasteries, learning to pray with Muslims and Christians and trying to experience something of how they encounter God in their lives. My pilgrimage into Islam and Christianity was intended to see whether religion could be a source of peace rather than divisiveness. It was also an attempt for me, as a religious Israeli Jew, to find my place in the Middle East, by connecting with the faiths of my neighbors. That journey reinforced for me the conviction that peace in the Middle East can only happen if sprituality is part of the language and sensibility of the peacemakers.