“If Jews and Germans could come together and listen and hear each other's stories, it's like a message to the world. Anyone could do this.”
— Miry Klements (Maryland, US)
The German-Jewish Project
A Compassionate Listening Journey
Germans and Jews come together to listen, to grieve, to remember, and to discover what reconciliation can look like when we let it in.
Listening across the inheritance of the Holocaust
In 2003 and 2004, the Compassionate Listening Project brought together Germans and American Jews, about two dozen people in each gathering, to do something deceptively simple and profoundly difficult: listen to one another without defense, without judgment, and without rushing to repair the silence between them.
This project grew out of more than a decade of Compassionate Listening work in the Middle East. The Compassionate Listening Project Founder Leah Green felt drawn to work with a wound still shaping the lives of descendants across the globe and bleeding into countless other conflicts, including that in Israel and Palestine. The German-Jewish Project carried the vision and tools of Compassionate Listening into the shadow of the Holocaust.
Two gatherings anchored the journey: in October 2003 at Lebensgarten, an eco-village in northern Germany built on the site of a former Nazi munitions works, and in October 2004 in Germantown, Maryland and Washington, D.C., where participants visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and met with survivors and their families.
Our “road map” will be the Five Core Practices of Compassionate Listening. We will use these concepts to process and deepen our learning and our connections with the people we meet as well as with one another. These practices are:
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Cultivating Compassion for Self and Others
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Developing the Fair Witness (Suspending judgment)
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Respecting Self and Others
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Listening with the Heart
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Speaking from the Heart
We invite you to participate in this deeply transformative Journey of the heart, to listen, learn, engage in anti-bias work, and to build relationships.
This trip will include sites and meetings which will require walks of up to 1 mile in Montgomery and 4 blocks in Birmingham. For those for whom this would be challenging, Ubers, Lyfts and taxis are available.
“It's been a very deep exploration of pain.”
— Brian Berman, Co-Director (United States)
“I thought I wouldn't like America — this is ‘Bushland.’ But it's a beautiful country. The people are so kind.”
— Helena Weynerowski (Germany)
“I grew up with guilt and ignorance and shame about my country… I needed to be connected to Jews and the Jewish people. The experience has given me my faith back, my faith in humanity.”
— Martin Dronsfield, Co-Facilitator (Germany)
LEADERSHIP TEAM
The 2002 & 2003 Journeys were co-led by Compassionate Listening facilitators Leah Green, Andrea Cohen and Joel Berman.
Yael Petretti, Journey Co-Leader
Western Massachusetts
Yael’s connection to the civil rights struggle grew out of her participation in the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington, her life-changing experience of helping build Resurrection City and tutoring children of color whose schools were being desegregated in southern Virginia. Certified as a CL facilitator in 2004, she led and co-led a number of CL delegations to Israel-Palestine where she lived for almost three decades. Yael co-authored “Making Peace with Faith: The Challenges of Religion and Peacebuilding” (Peace and Security in the 21st Century, 2018.) She lives in New England where she facilitates CL trainings and volunteers as an Alternatives to Violence facilitator in a men's high security prison. Witnessing the “new Jim Crow” there has brought her around full-circle to rejoin the struggle for racial/social justice here in the U.S. In January 2020, she initiated and co-led the first domestic Compassionate Listening delegation, “Listening in the Heart of Alabama.” You can visit her website at listeningwiththeheart.org.
Joel Berman, Journey Co-Leader
Concord, New Hampshire
Joel is a retired family physician who delivered primary care in the village of Penacook, NH from 1980 to 2006. He ended his medical career as Chief Medical Information Officer at Concord Hospital, overseeing the introduction of electronic provider order entry and participating in organization-wide improvements in medical quality and safety. During Joel's four Compassionate Listening Journeys to Israel and Palestine between 2015 and 2019, and his Journey to Alabama in January 2020, he recorded and transcribed more than 40 listening sessions that form the basis for public presentations designed to humanize the “other” and help local audiences recognize the common humanity and shared values of people across geo-political divides. He received CL certification training in 2016 and 2017 and has facilitated Compassionate Listening training sessions throughout New Hampshire.
Will Osmun, MM, MS, MA, Ph.D., Journey trainer
West Michigan
As a volunteer on a Crisis and Suicide Hotline, Will was trained in Empathic Listening. He has a BA in Communications and is certified in Compassionate Listening, Mediation, Immunity to Change and Motivational Interviewing. In his recent role at the Urban League of West Michigan, Will provided trainings on Implicit Biases related to the ‘othering’ of historically marginalized groups. As a CL facilitator, Will understands the change process and lovingly encourages participants to lean into their discomfort as they develop new skills and deeper understanding of themselves and their ‘other’. See Will's website here.