What We Do When No Camera Is Present

A large part of our work is organizing, not speaking. Someone has to book the room, coordinate the date with three congregations, plan the catering around the respective dietary rules and clean up afterward. It is exactly this unspectacular part that decides whether an encounter happens or not. We are volunteers, working in small groups in different places and coordinating with local partners, because central planning rarely works in this field. Anyone who joins us should expect tasks, not a podium. In return, you see fairly quickly whether something has an effect.

Events and Formats

Small circles of fifteen to thirty people, where you can interrupt each other, work best. We invite people to discussion evenings in which one topic is opened up through two perspectives, such as circumcision, mourning rituals, dietary laws or how to handle the Middle East conflict at the kitchen table. Added to these are guided tours in which a group visits a synagogue in the morning and a mosque in the afternoon and discusses it in the evening. Around January 27, we take part in memorial events and bring in perspectives that are otherwise missing from the German commemoration scene. We rarely hold larger professional conferences, and then together with other organizations, because they take a lot of energy. We announce current dates through our members list and through the channels of the Turkish Community in Germany.

One format we especially value is conversations with descendants. There are families whose grandparents were saved on Rhodes in 1944, and there are families in Turkey in which the memory of the same events was passed on in quite a different way. When these people sit in the same room, something emerges that no lecture can produce. We prepare such evenings for a long time, because they can go wrong. Beforehand we talk with everyone involved about boundaries, about topics that should not be raised and about the schedule. Nobody sees this groundwork, but it is the difference between a successful and a hurtful event.

School and Youth Work

Teachers usually get in touch with a concrete problem. An antisemitic remark was made in a class, a project day is coming up, or a memorial site trip needs preparing. We then come to the school, work with the class on a specific biography and let the young people research for themselves. The story of Selahattin Ülkümen suits this well, because it does not anticipate a moral verdict but describes a situation of decision. What would you have done if you had sat behind that desk, and what would it have cost you? Questions like these produce real discussions, whereas pedagogy of dismay mostly produces silence. We work without assigning blame to any particular group, which occasionally earns us criticism but keeps the classes engaged.

Mistakes We Made Ourselves

The most common mistake in dialogue work is the symbolic event. You invite officials, everyone says friendly sentences, the press photographs a handshake, and the next day nothing is different. We took part in such events and lost a lot of time doing so. The second mistake is avoiding conflict. If you consistently keep the Middle East, criticism of Israel and conspiracy narratives out of the program so that the evening stays harmonious, participants lose trust in the format. The third mistake is too much haste: a single workshop changes little, while three meetings over half a year change a lot. And finally, we learned that it makes a difference who invites. If the invitation comes from an agency, different people show up than if it comes from the neighborhood.

What happens when this work is simply dropped can be seen in cities without such structures. There, conflicts escalate faster because nobody has the phone numbers to de-escalate. There, after an attack on a synagogue or a mosque, each community stays by itself, and the public debate is led by people who know neither side. Dialogue work is therefore not a nicety but a precaution. It costs little money and a lot of patience, and it pays off in exactly the moments when things get serious.

Publications and Materials

We provide texts, chronicles and collections of materials that you can use in teaching or congregation work. These include short biographies of our two namesakes, a timeline of the deportation from the Dodecanese and pointers to archives, memorial sites and scholarly literature. We also write articles for congregation newsletters and are available to newsrooms for information, though only on topics where we actually have expertise. If you need material for a memorial event, get in touch in good time, because volunteer structures are slow. A short email with the occasion, the date and the target group is enough to start.

Join In, Support Us, Contact

You can become a member with us, regardless of your religion or origin. Some of our active people are neither Jewish nor Muslim but simply interested in this history. We need people who help organize events, edit texts, translate, arrange rooms or just come regularly. Donations help us with travel costs, printing and technology, and since we maintain no full-time office, practically everything goes into the projects. Write to us at [email protected] and say briefly what you bring and where you live. If you would like to read up beforehand, you will find the historical framework under Yitzhak Sarfati and an overview of our work on the home page.