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Awards in IEA:
We are happy and honored to announce that the Interfaith Encounter Association has received the following awards:
WOMEN'S PEACE INITIATIVE AWARD
INTR°A-PROJECT AWARD FOR THE COMPLEMENTATION OF RELIGIONS
OCTOBER 2007: WOMEN'S PEACE INITIATIVE AWARD
It is with great pleasure and pride that on behalf of the Interfaith
Encounter Association I am able to once again congratulate Ms. Najeeba
Sirhan and Ms. Osnat Aram-Daphna, our coordinators of the Karmiel & Majd
el-Krum Interfaith Encounter group, for being selected as the recipients of
the Women’s Peace Initiative Award of the
Tanenbaum Center for
Interreligious Understanding. The Tanenbaum Center launched its Middle
East-North Africa Women’s Peace Initiative in 2006 to identify, promote, and
support religiously motivated women who are risking their lives and freedom
for peace in areas of armed conflict in the Middle East-North Africa region.
This award follows the success of the center's Peacemakers in Action
initiative, which annually recognizes grassroots religious peacemakers – men
or women - from conflict areas around the world. The Women’s Peace
Initiative was created to bring increased attention specifically to the
important work being done by religious women peacemakers in the Middle East
and North Africa.
The award was presented on Monday, Oct. 22, by the three holders of the
Bosnian Presidency (Haris Silajdzic, Zeljko Komsic and Nebojsa Radmanovic),
at a press conference and dinner with dignitaries, ambassadors, local
government officials, scholars, NGO practitioners and other civil society
representatives. The evening of 22 October also included a private meeting
between the Bosnian Presidency and all of the Peacemakers, as well as a
celebratory dinner and a number of other events during the course of the
week at which the Peacemakers will have opportunities to acquaint the other
attendees with their important work.
It is our fervent hope that this prestigious award will support and
encourage Najeeba and Osnat in their own efforts while inspiring others to
follow in your footsteps.
The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding (www.tanenbaum.org)
is based in New York and provides practical programs to prevent the growing
problem of verbal and physical conflict based on religion. Through its
Women’s Peace Initiative, the Tanenbaum Center identify, study, and
reinforce the work of religiously-motivated women peacemakers in the Middle
East-North Africa (MENA), by focusing on the individual women who are
risking their lives to bring peace to their communities.
OCTOBER 2007: INTR°A-PROJECT AWARD FOR THE COMPLEMENTATION OF RELIGIONS
It gives us great pleasure to announce that the
InterReligiöse Arbeitsstelle (Institute for Interrreligious Studies, or
INTRA, http://www.interrel.de) of
NorthRhine-Westphalia, Germany has selected IEA to be the 2007 recipient of
their prestigious INTR°A-Project Award for the Complementation of Religions,
which includes a substantial monetary grant to further IEA's work. INTRA was
founded to advance the belief that the preservation, deepening and support
of one's own religious identity and spirituality can serve as the basis for
an ongoing dialogue with other faiths.
The INTRA Project Award is given for advancing religious dialogue between
equal partners, in an atmosphere which is free of exclusive claims to
religious truth that devalue other faith communities, and in which all
religious communities and individual believers are encouraged to ask what
they are able to do in order to contribute to reconciliation, and how the
ongoing interpretation and study of each group's sacred texts can help in
this task. It is extraordinarily gratifying that INTRA has recognized the
ongoing work of IEA, which now sponsors over 20 ongoing dialogue groups and
projects, as an organization on which the advancement and deepening of
interfaith understanding in the Mideast critically depends.
FEBRUARY 2006: PRIZE FOR HUMANITY
Interfaith Encounter Association and its Executive director Dr. Yehuda Stolov were chosen by the Nominating Committee of the Immortal Chaplains Foundation ( www.immortalchaplains.org ) to receive its 2006 Prize for Humanity.
Israeli, Palestinian & 'Katrina' Heroes will receive honor on Queen Mary
Long Beach, CA -- The Immortal Chaplains Foundation announced it will
present its 7th Prize for Humanity on Sunday February 5th 2006 from 2-4pm
aboard The Queen Mary, an historic ocean liner that also served as a WWII
troopship. The four Chaplains - Jewish, Catholic and Protestant - gave up
their life jackets to soldiers on the torpedoed troopship Dorchester, and
went down together, arm-in-arm in common prayer on February 3, 1943. Their
self-sacrifice and compassion for others, regardless of faith or race, was
memorialized on a 1948 U.S. postage stamp entitled "These Immortal Chaplains
- Interfaith in Action". Their legacy is the basis for The Immortal
Chaplains Prize for Humanity, given to "those who risked all to protect
others of a different faith or ethnic origin." Honorees for 2006 are:
Dr. Yehuda Stolov & Interfaith Encounter Association in Israel & Palestine;
Dr. Stolov, an Orthodox Jewish-Israeli, organized colleagues from Muslim,
Christian, Jewish and Druze faiths in 2001 to counter the escalating
violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Risking their lives, they held
public seminars to break down hostility and mistrust and have now created a
sustainable model of Interfaith understanding and hope. Representing the
organization's colleagues for the Prize will be Ms. Najeeba Sirhan,
Palestinian School Principal in Majd el-Krum. (www.Interfaith-Encounter.org)
Petty Officer 2nd Class, Jonathan M. Rice & U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Teams;
During the devastating 2005 'Hurricane Katrina' in New Orleans, Coast Guard
Petty Officer Rice and his crew of rescue helicopter CG6522, were the first
to appear to those abandoned to the storm. As Rescue Swimmer, Rice risked
all to affect the hoisting rescue of 223 persons – most of different
ethnicity than himself. Meeting with extreme physical hazards, Rice
portrayed a positive attitude of hope continuously for 5 days and nights.
Past Honorees include (2000) Paul Rusesabagina, subject of the recent film,
Hotel Rwanda; (1999) Amy Biehl, an American Fulbright scholar who died in
the struggle against apartheid in South Africa; and (2000) Chiune Sugihara,
a Japanese diplomat who signed over 5000 visas for Jews escaping the Nazis
in WWII. For a complete list see:
www.ImmortalChaplains.org. The Foundation recently move its headquarters
from Minneapolis, MN to Long Beach, CA aboard The Queen Mary. An Interfaith
Memorial Sanctuary at the new location will include a diorama depicting the
final moments of the four Immortal Chaplains and the 670 men who died with
them.