Audio: Yehuda Stolov on how to run an interfaith encounter

Chicago Public Radio recently ran an interview with Dr Yehuda Stolov, the Executive Director of the Interfaith Encounter Association in Israel and Palestine.

Based in Jerusalem, the IEA has 29 ongoing groups.  Stolov says that they are not an interfaith organisation in the regular sense.  For IEA, interfaith dialog is a tool that they use to build better relationships between people.

Stolov talks about how when the encounters began seven years ago at the height of the intifada, the Jews involved had never met had never met Muslims before, and vice versa – they only information they had about each other was via the media, whose chief message was that the other group only wanted to kill them. By the end of the encounter weekend, many strong friendships had been formed.