Please click HERE to listen to the most recent Shalom Crafters radio show.
Sunday Dec. 13th, 2015 8pm
The program Shalom Crafters is within the framework of Microphones for Peace, the interfaith radio of JLM.FM: Center of the City Radio. A David Goodman Production. We were broadcasted from the Beita and I am Raanan Mallek.
The show was dedicated to how interfaith and sustainable development can work hand-in-hand to promote peaceful relations in this torn land.
My first guest was Yasmin Barhum who has worked for the past eight years as a facilitator at 'Living in the Levant', which aims to present Islam and the Arab population of Israel to non-Muslims through tours in the town of Ein Rafa. She has also worked as a garden designer at 'Young Green Leaf.' She completed her B.A in land architecture at Leeds University in 2001. Since then, she gained experience in landscape planning through her work in the U.K. and in Israel. She participated in a horticultural course in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens and graduated from a community organizing and advocacy course at Jaffa College. She is a Muslim convert, married to an Israeli Arab and blessed with four children.
My second guest was Rabbi Yonatan Neril, executive director of the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development. He is a native of California, who completed an M.A. and B.A. from Stanford University with a focus on global environmental issues, and received rabbinical ordination in Israel. He has spoken internationally on religion and the environment, and organized two interfaith environmental conferences in Jerusalem in which religious leaders of several faiths spoke. He is the lead author and general editor of two publications on Jewish environmental ethics including Uplifting People and Planet: 18 Essential Jewish Teachings on the Environment and was a Dorot and PresenTense Fellow.
My third guest was Noam Dolgin, who was a leader in Jewish environmental and Israeli environmental education from 1998 - 2012 having taught extensively across the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. During that time he developed numerous curricula on Jewish environmental values related climate change, food and agriculture, Israel's environment, sustainable peace and much more. The highlight of Noam's work include serving as Associate Director of the Teva Learning Center, as Executive Director of the Green Zionist Alliance and a founder of the Kayam Farm at Pearlstone. Noam lived for two years in Israel including one as a student at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies on Kibbutz Ketura. He now lives in Vancouver Canada where he now works as a real estate agent with a focus on sustainable housing and volunteers with a number of Jewish and interfaith organizations.
The main topics for the show are were:
- The relationship between interfaith and sustainable development/environment and why both are important for peace in the Holy Land.
- Eco-themes of Hanukkah
- The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development and its successes over the past five years. A report on what transpired in Paris and Israel’s involvement internationally in helping to improve the state of the environment.
- Major challenges to the environment in Israel/Palestine affecting peace and the ability to attain peace: climate change as a global issue for humans (especially how it will asymmetrically affect the poor), religion can help us return to our agrarian roots – salient point of the power of religion, how ‘environment’ means so many different things to many different people, access to resources for the survival of humans in the 21st century.
- Thoughts on environmental issues important to Palestinians and how Islam relates to the environment as a whole.