by Arabella Norton - CCJ Project and Education Manager

In July, Arabella Norton, one of our new Project and Education Managers, represented CCJ at the International Council of Christians and Jews bi-annual conference, which took place this year in Hannover. Over 100 delegates were in attendance from across the world to reflect on discuss this year’s theme “Repentance, Repair and Reconciliation: Religious Resources for Tumultuous Times.”

The conference opened with the presentation of the Seelisberg Prize to Rabbi Dr David Meyer for his work at the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome. What then followed were days of extreme intensity in which interactive workshops were interspersed with plenary speeches and panel discussions. For one example of the richness of these, please see the lecture given by Rabbi Noam Marans here.

It is impossible for me to do justice to all the scholarship presented so I will just mention a couple of stand-out sessions. The first was the presentation given by Katharina von Kellenbach, Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at St Mary’s College, Maryland (2021) and Visiting Fellow in Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College (2021-26). She opened her lecture by acknowledging her difficult position as the descendant of a Holocaust perpetrator and how she has spent her life’s work wrestling with this fact. The metaphors she used of plastic and toxic waste not yet decontaminated but floating in the ocean to describe the moral sewage in which we still live and have not yet been composted down was very powerful.

A completely different contribution was made by Rabbi Shoshana Boyd-Gelfand who argued compellingly for a recognition of the different types of inter-faith religious encounter, namely: symbolic and public; protected and private and internal conversations within our own faith communities. She then gave riveting examples of each type drawn from her personal experience. A consummate public speaker, Shoshana captivated us all with her wit and wisdom.

One of the most interactive and challenging workshops I attended was the one run by Ophir Yarden from the Rossing Centre, Israel. He required us to plan an itinerary for participants from a variety of faiths to the Holy Land and work out what sites/experiences to include and which to omit and to consider contingency arrangements for various scenarios (all drawn from his real-life experiences) into our plans. This generated great discussion amongst the attendees and has certainly developed my thinking for future CCJ Israel/Palestine trips.

On the Tuesday afternoon we had the opportunity to go on various field trips, and I chose to visit Bergen Belsen. Unlike other concentration and death camp sites, there are no visible remains of the horrors which once were there and so conveying the history of the site takes place through the exhibitions in the museum and the verbal explanations given by the guides. The afternoon concluded with the Jewish members reciting the Kaddish and as a Christian I felt privileged to be allowed to stand by watching in sorrow and solidarity with tears streaming down my face. Sitting next to my new friend on the bus home, Fr Rafael Starnitzky,  (Head of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jewish People) was a time of deep reflection as we shared with each other our feelings from the afternoon and reaffirmed our commitment to the work of CCJ.

In conclusion, this trip was incredibly worthwhile. We were greatly encouraged by being able to share with each other the challenges of doing the work of repentance, repair and reconciliation in our respective countries with their distinctive contexts. I felt greatly honoured to have been the CCJ UK Central Office representative and have come home with a greater awareness of the challenges facing CCJ: but also, greater strength from knowing that we fight on together and that our religions can and do provide rich resources for tumultuous times.