WHAT:  WAGING PEACE IN A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli youth speaking together

WHEN: Friday, August 23, 2002 -- 6:45 p.m.
WHERE:  Congregation B'Nai Jeshurun

100A W. 89th Street at Columbus Avenue

New York, NY 10024-1902.

     Sixteen Jewish and Arab (Christian and Muslim) Teen Peacemakers from Israel speak to celebrate their survival as a mixed community through nearly two years of violence.
     The teens have just come from OPEN HOUSE Peace Center in Ramle, Israel, where many of them and their parents have been part of a 12-year-long mixed family group that has been meeting and working together to deal with the hatred and violence that surrounds them.
     OPEN HOUSE is on the Web at:

http://www.friendsofopenhouse.org/ AND http://www.friendsofopenhouse.org

     The teens are veterans of a Youth Leadership training program in nonviolent communications skills and prejudice reduction working with peers in local schools and centers in Ramle and surrounding areas.
     Jewish Dalia and Yehezkel Landau, and Palestinian Michail Fanous, are co-founders of OPEN HOUSE, the unique Jewish/Arab Peace Education and Coexistence Center in Ramle, Israel.  They will describe their grass-roots peacemaking between Jews and Arabs in a mixed city where the Likud Mayor now gives support.
     They are completing their speaking tour that has taken them throughout the northeast United States.

BACKGROUND:

     OPEN HOUSE  serves as a center where Jews, Christians and Muslims come together to work for peace by living as friends and neighbors and doing coexistence training programs in their own community of the mixed city of Ramle and surrounding areas.
     OPEN HOUSE  opened in 1991 in Ramle, Israel, in the childhood home of Dalia Landau, daughter of a Holocaust refugee family. In l967 after her family received a visit from the original Arab owners, the al-Khairys, who had been evicted in l948, the two families began a long relationship.
     In 1991, Dalia Landau, the Jewish woman who grew up in the house after 1948, decided together with her husband Yehezkel and the al-Khayri family, whose home it was before 1948, to dedicate the house to the children of Ramle who embody the hope for a better future.
     Dalia donated her home to be used as a center for healing and reconciliation with the blessings and continued participation of the original Arab-Muslim owners, the al-Khayri family.


Contact:
Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, U.S. Director
Friends of OPEN HOUSE
Tel. 413.540.0145 * Cell:  413-250-3249 * Fax 413.540.0146
E-mail: Carolyn@friendsofopenhouse.org
PO Box 1144 * Northampton, MA 01061-1144