Interfaith Encounter Association

The Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA) works to promote genuine coexistence and sustainable peace, through joint community building on the grassroots level, using interactive interfaith dialogue as its vehicle. The a-political and all-inclusive approach of the organization and its activities continuously form the human infrastructure for peace in the Holy Land. In its ten years of existence, the IEA have held – in its three regional focuses: in Israel, between Israelis and Palestinians and in the larger Middle East – more than 1000 programs, with thousands of participants. A most significant fact is that the participants in IEA programs include people of all political and religious views, as well as all ages, genders, walks of life etc; and that the vast majority of them have met 'the other' for the first time through IEA. The IEA have formed till now 38 on-going community-groups of interfaith encounter – from the Upper Galilee to Eilat, including 7 groups that bring together on a regular basis Israelis and West Bank Palestinians. Among the latter we maintain the two only groups in the country that bring together Palestinians with Settlers. IEA maintains working relations with 7 Palestinian organizations, across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and is a founding partner of the Middle East Abrahamic Forum, with additional organizations from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. For its work the IEA has been recognized by UNESCO as "an organization that promotes the culture of peace" and awarded the 2006 Prize for Humanity by the Immortal Chaplains Foundation. In 2007 Two of IEA’s coordinators won the Women’s Peace Initiative Award of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and the IEA was the recipient of the 2007 INTR°A-Project Award for the Complementation of Religions of The Institute for Interreligious Studies. The film "Interfaith Encounter in the Galilee", produced by IEA to present the work of its school-twinning project, was awarded the Commendable Effort by the World Peace Film Award 2007 of the World Movement for Global Democracy. In May 2008, the IEA was one of the sixty projects, selected as "the entrepreneurial projects that will change the face of Tomorrow" to present at the Israeli Presidential Conference – one of only eleven social projects and the only project of peaceful coexistence.