01.07.2025

Peace in a Time of Conflict

Each day begins with a short Morning Meditation, prepared each time by conference participants.

There are three lectures during the conference, one each from jewish, christian and muslim perspectives. Planned to be in person, the conflict and a case of illness meant that two lectures were held online.

Norita Sembiring (4th from left) in a Buzz Group after one of the lectures. All photos by: Katarzyna Kowalska NDS

“Even though the world is in turmoil, this week-long conference demonstrated how peace movements can be initiated at the grassroots level.”, Rev Dr Norita Sembiring says. She is Head of Global Education at United Evangelical Mission (UEM). As part of her work, Sembiring is member of the board of the JCM Conference for the Dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe, which gathered for the 52^nd time this June 2025.

The theme was "Peace in a Time of Conflict."  The Conference tried to evaluate the experience of people that live in and lived through violent conflicts and address the challenges that war and violence bring to the dialogue tables. In Vallendar, Germany, it brought together 54 people from Germany and Poland, the United Kingdom and Israel, as well as Israel and Tanzania via online participation.

A Conference in the midst of war

As if embodying the theme above, the conference opened just days after Israel had started firing at targets in Iran and Iran firing back. This meant that at the beginning of the conference on Monday, June 16, two whole groups from Israel with Jewish and Palestinian youth, who were supposed to join the conference, were stuck on the ground. At the opening of the conference, participants learnt that Shada Chatib, a student at Haifa University and prospective JCM participant in 2026, had been killed by an Iranian missile. In the silence that followed, participants united in a spontaneous prayer for peace, sung by members of all three religions, which might be the best summary of JCM’s stance on the middle eastern conflict past and present.

While the muslim-palestinian group from Israel made their way and joined the conference by Wednesday night, the group from Haifa University stayed at home, some of them following the conference online. Prof Moshe Lavee, leader of the group and this year’s Jewish speaker, gave his lecture online directly from his appartment’s bomb shelter, in order to have at least three hours of quiet. He emphazized that Judaism needed to become aware of violent potentials in its own sacred texts, which should not be followed, but neither denied and brushed under the carpet. He concluded: “The awareness — or perhaps the belief — that God gave human beings the power of choice, means also that another way is possible. That it is possible to rise from all this evil. For within the heart of every human being — Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Muslim, religious and secular, believer and skeptic — within every heart lies also the possibility of choosing good”.

The Muslim and Christian speakers shared their perspectives on peacebuilding in the Christian Scouts movement and in islamic feminist movements in the Balkans.

Returning to prayer

Towards the end of the conference, participants joined the weekly celebrations of each of the three religions. Together with the Dialogue Groups, in which confidential exchange is possible, these times of worship are the heart of the conference. At JCM, everyone is invited to either fully join into each celebration, participate as a guest or stay outside as a respectful observer. This way, the Friday Prayer, the Shabbat Services and the Sunday Service all worked to connect the members of the three religions, without imposing unity upon the diversity of believers.

Next year, JCM is set to take place in Vallendar, Germany, on February 9 – 15, 2026.