Staten Island Advance, NY
June 10 2006
Interfaith prayers for genocide victims
Saturday, June 10, 2006
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER
Staten Island’s interfaith community will come together June 25 for
“Building Bridges,” a program to reflect on the horror of genocide as
it has occurred all over the globe.
The program will take place from 4 to 5 p.m. at Congregation B’nai
Jeshurun, 275 Martling Ave., West Brighton.
Program organizers are planning to have speakers address the
Holocaust, which killed six million Jews; the Armenian genocide, in
which 1.5 million people were killed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire,
and the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which claimed the lives of 800,000
ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus while the world watched but did not
intervene.
Rabbi Judah Newberger, spiritual leader of B’nai Jeshurun, will give
the introduction. Clergy from the Christim, Muslim and Hindu
communities also have been invited to offer a prayer for
reconciliation.
The committee organizing the afternoon reflection is the same group
that for the last several years has sponsored an interfaith Passover
seder, a well-attended event held annually at St. Teresa’s R.C.
Church in Castleton Corners. Bonds forged there convinced the group,
made up of Catholic lay people and Jewish, Catholic and Protestant
clergy, to look for other areas where people of faith and goodwill
could come together.
The June 25 event is the first of two planned on the topic of
genocide. The second “Building Bridges” program will take place on
the bridge at Martlings Pond in Clove Lakes Park on Sept. 17.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
