Lynn Gottlieb's blog

Greetings from Jerusalem. The following article was published today by the Palestine News Network based on an interview done with me.

The Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center is currently seeking Muslim Interfaith Fellows for residency in our community. We are dedicated to building multifaith community grounded in nonviolence and are currently in our third year. Recruiting Muslim Interfaith Fellows is a top priority for us. We would love your help.

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For the Jewish community, it is the celebration of the fall harvest. For the Palestinian community in Israel, it is the season of the olive harvest. Below you will find reports of violence around Nablus, where I worked during the month of September.

Getting between Palestine and Israel is challenging, even for someone who possesses an American passport. To visit Jerusalem from Beit Sahour where we are staying, our small artist delegation takes a cab to the Separation Wall for 20 shekels where Palestinian cab drivers in various states of economic desperation wait to snag anyone coming through in the other direction. We walk the long uphill corridor toward the Israeli side and arrive at the first checkpoint. We are standing outside without cover next to an empty parking lot that connects to the other internal checkpoint. Luckily it’s not raining. If you are disabled, I can only image the trip must be nearly impossible, because the circular iron gates with many bars through which one must pass are not built for wheelchairs.

The process of creating the mural in the courtyard between four houses in Balata refugee camp involved gaining the support and excitement of key community leadership, especially from the families living around the courtyard. One of the houses belongs to the family of Ibtisam, the director of the women’s programme center explained our project house by house.

On Thursday, with thoughts about Troy Davis very much on my mind, I began a series of intentional conversations about detention and prison with residents of Balata whose path I have crossed through this project.

Mustafa is a 29 year old filmmaker, graduate of Al Najah University, resident of the old city of Nablus where he lives in a house hundreds of years old. We went to a coffee and hookah shop overlooking the demonstration that was taking place in Nablus’ city center and had an intense conversation in light of the relatively festive event in support of Palestinian rights taking place below.

Thirty-three-year-old Ayaash manages the Yasmeen Hotel in the heart of the old city of Nablus. He tells us the lower part of the building is five hundred years old while the upper story was built about 20 years ago minus the planned third story which was interrupted by the second Intifada.

The past several days Jared, Dara and I have been working with the UNWRA girls schools associated with Balata Refugee Camp on the first stage of the mural project. We asked the group of young women about 13 years old chosen to work with us to share with us what is beautiful in their lives, and then to render their thoughts into images.

Lynn Gottlieb, Jared Wood, and Dara Hajjar are reporting from the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s fall 2011 arts delegation to Balata, Palestine. Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is co-leading this FOR delegation, and wrote this from Nablus, Palestine.