Content area
Full Text
NEVE SHALOM/WAHAT AL-SALAM WAS FOUNDED BY
Father Bruno Hussar who envisioned a village where Jews, Muslims, and Christians would live together and leam to listen, understand, respect, and trust one another. Born in Egypt in 1911 to secular Jewish Hungarian parents, young Bruno Hussar moved to France to study during his early 20's and converted to Catholicism. In 1950, he was ordained a priest and began a lifetime commitment to bringing understanding between people of different faiths. Throughout the mid- 1950s and 1960s, Father Bruno traveled and lived in Israel where he reconnected with his Jewish roots and worked to build better relationships between the Christian andjewish communities. In 1972, he convinced the Latrun Trappist Monastery, a producer of wine in the land of Israel for more than 300 years, to lease him a portion of its domain. It was on this hillside, overlooking the Ayalon Valley, where Bruno was inspired by the phrase from the Bible: "My people shall dwell in an oasis of peace" (Isaiah 18:32). He had a vision of "a village wherejews and Arabs from the country will live together in harmony and peace and collaboration.-And the name of that village will be Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the "Oasis of Peace," to prove by its existence that cooperation is possible" (Oasis of Dreams 124).
Father Bruno camped on this hillside in a large shipping crate with no water or electricity waiting for others to join him. After six years of living in these conditions without convincing others to share his dream. Father Bruno was ready to give up, realizing that perhaps at 67 time was working against him. "I did something very rash that I wouldn't advise anybody to do," said Bruno. "I sent an ultimatum to God, and I gave Him one year to give me two signs" (Oasis of Dreams 126). The first sign would be the arrival of one family to live with him on the hill; the second sign would be raising enough money to begin building a school to teach peace to others. Two months later Bruno received his signs. It was 1979 when the first families arrived-onejewish-lsraeli, the other Christian ArabIsraeli. Around the same time, Bruno met a German donor whose support led to the installation...