Join the Truah Year-in-Israel Program in Partnership with Rabbis for Human Rights’s Tu B’Shvat tiyyul to Umm al-Hiran. The village has been in the headlines since January 18 when, in the early morning hours, hundreds of police officers came to demolish part of the Bedouin village, as part of Netanyahu’s broader campaign to ramp up home demolitions in the Arab sector. The village is slated for demolition to make way for a new Jewish town that will be called “Hiran.” In the ensuing clashes, a Bedouin Israeli resident, Yakub Abu al-Qian, and a Jewish Israeli police officer, Erez Levi, were killed. The police say that the officer was killed by a ramming attack perpetrated by the resident, but the residents and human rights activists who were there dispute the police’s version of events, saying that the resident lost control over his vehicle after being shot by police. Protests have broken out across the country to demand an end to home demolitions and police violence.
Join us to visit the residents, hear their story, and stand with rabbis from across Israel to support peace, human rights and friendship between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Learn about the history of Umm al-Hiran and the roots of the home demolition crisis that Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Bedouin in particular, face. Plant olive and fruit trees in the village as an expression of solidarity and hope for a better future for both peoples.
After every tiyyul, we hold a follow-up dinner, which as an inseparable part of the tiyyul. The follow-up dinner is an valuable opportunity for us to build professional relationships with each other as future rabbis, cantors and Jewish educators. In the follow-up dinner, we explore what’s next for us in light of what we experienced, how we can draw on this experience in our future role as communal leaders, what further learning we may be interested in on this topic in the future, and how we can translate our learning about human rights in Israel to human rights work back home.
The follow-up dinner will be Monday, February 13 from 19:00-21:00 at the offices of the Reform Movement on the HUC campus. Please meet us at the lobby of Beit Shmuel on Eliyahu Shama 6, Jerusalem.