In January 2008, following 18 months of meetings and group processes to build trust between participants of the Jerusalem Program, the school track was launched. The goal of the school track is to assimilate the subject of inter-religious dialogue in the school curricula through long-term educational projects initiated by the school staff for the students.
To the list of participating schools
To view videos of the school projects
The objective of the educational projects is to confront deal with the phenomena of ignorance, and unfamiliarity with religion, culture, historic narrative and psychology of the “Other”, which lead to hatred and stereotyping towards the “Other”.
The school teams generally work together with a professional advisor on behalf of Mosaica, who assists and follows the development of the team's projects for the school and their suitability to the cultural profile of the school's population of students and teachers.
The program's policy states that the projects will be developed independently by the school team for a number of reasons:
| ○ | Creation of long-term commitment towards the program by the school team. |
| ○ | Building trust among students and teachers towards the program as ”of our own making” rather than an externally-imposed one (the school is the best evaluator of the nature of its own population's cultural background, predicted difficulties and advantages relating to the project implementation, etc.) |
| ○ | School team empowerment |
In Jaunary 2008, the school teams began developing the educational projects. Each team builds a pilot program which will runs throughout the current school year (until June 2008), which will serve as a basis for the continued development and implementation during the following school year (2008/9).
The professional team of Mosaica will subsidize the projects and will continue its professional support of the teams in the coming years. Experience of organizations in Israel dealing with dialogue programs shows that close professional accompaniment is essential for the success of the projects and the assimilation of the subject of inter-religious dialogue both at school and in general, in the long-run, which is why Mosaica exerts full efforts on the subject.
