Indianapolis Star · Indianapolis, IN · 26 March 2000

CP-2000-069

Children fulfilling pope’s dreams

■ At Jerusalem YMCA, Arab, Christian and Jewish youngsters are learning to get along.

By Judith Cebula, STAFF WRITER

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — Pope John Paul II isn’t going to the Jerusalem International YMCA today, his last day in Israel.

Instead, the Holy Father will make a final historic blitz across this city of three faiths — for prayer at the Western Wall, the most sacred place for Jews; a tour of Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the third most holy Muslim site; and Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus was crucified, died and was buried.

If the 79-year-old man, so full of pleas for peace, walked into the Jerusalem Y, he would see the fulfillment of his prayers in Jewish, Muslim and Christian children learning to love one another as they learn together how to tie their shoes. For 20 years, Arab and Israeli Jewish boys and girls have been coming to this unique preschool.

Together they draw pictures of trees and birds, build houses from Lego blocks and run around in circles on the playground for the simple joy of it. “Children are the innocents,” said Daphna Bassewitch Ginzberg, the preschool’s director. “They are too young to have stereotypes or prejudices.

They are still naive enough to become friends easily.” … Children at the YMCA know nothing of this pain. They are 3- and 4- and 5-year-olds from working-class families and wealthy families. Most spend their days in mixed classrooms — half of the students are Jewish, the other half Arab. Most of the Arab children are Muslim. Just 2 percent are Christian.

The demographics reflect Jerusalem itself. Like street signs, every bulletin board, art project and parent newsletter is bilingual — Hebrew and Arabic. Each classroom has two teachers: One is Jewish and speaks Hebrew; the other is Arab and speaks Arabic.

Even the children’s names and birth dates, written on colorful construction paper butterflies and doves decorating the classroom walls, contain both the fanciful Arabic and Hebrew scripts — Yael and Mohammed; Ahmad and Tali.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “The Indianapolis Star”.

Context added by this archive

A good clipping for the terminology question even though it never uses “Israeli Arab”.

It shows the categorisation problem in its raw form: in a 1,500-word article about a preschool in which half the children are Arab, the Arab children are never given a nationality while the Jewish children are, the sorting categories change three times, and no Arab parent, teacher or child speaks.

Cite this clipping

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