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Editorial

Seeking a Culture of Dialogue…”

…the theme of this issue.

The expression and the recommendation are taken from Pope John Paul II’s message to the first European Jewish-Catholic Encounter in January 2002.

“By their respective identities, Jews and Christians are linked to one another and must seek a culture of dialogue…”

Where there is a conversation between persons and groups, weapons are laid down and become silent. In a context of war, dialogue gives negotiation, social compromise, peace a chance. It gives the possibility to discover the other – the one facing me – gives that person a face which is made of the common human substance.

Dialogue is

“the path for overcoming division and conflict. It is the path which does not hand over the world to a faceless globalization, which inevitably becomes cruel… Dialogue transforms the foreigner into a friend and frees from the demon of violence. Nothing is ever lost in dialogue. It is the remedy which heals in depth and which frees from memory’s pathology, which opens people to the future.” (“Call to Peace” of the 16th Sant’Egidio Meeting in Palermo, 2002).

In this issue, we want first of all to pay tribute to the SIDIC review’s and Center’s contribution to dialogue over these past thirty-five years, since the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate no. 4.

And then we invite our readers to a panoramic tour of the various continents and countries, in order to gather some of the dreams for dialogue in the Middle East (Yehezkel Landau’s article), to give information on some realizations, such as the process begun by Fr. Emile Shoufani of Nazareth in Galilee, when he recently invited Jews, Muslims, Israelis, Palestinians, Christians to go together to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Africa offers us two inculturated contributions: one explores the Bantu term ubuntu in relation to the Hebrew shalom (Dr. Kasonga wa Kasonga), and the other confronts the experience of violence in Ruanda with biblical remembrance (Dr. André Karamaga).

In Poland, young Polish and Israeli students, at the initiative of their educators and teachers, get to know one another thanks to working together for several consecutive years to restore abandoned Jewish cemeteries (Lila Licari).

Finally, fifteen years in the life of a dialogue group with Jews and Catholics near Chicago are testified to with excerpts from their retrospective publication.

Tribute and panoramic tour are linked in the demanding words, the words of wisdom drawn from the old and new treasure of Jewish tradition offered by Prof. Jean Halpérin’s contribution, “Relations with the Other.”

The Documentation with texts calling for studious reflection, the News and the Book Reviews which include the thesis by Ombretta Pisano, SIDIC-ROMA’s documentalist, take measure of the slow, patient and sure steps along the paths on which we are

… “seeking a culture of dialogue”!