Peel Interfaith Peace Camp

by Rabbi Audrey Pollack, September 1, 2017

Peel Interfaith Peace Camp

In late Fall of last year, Solel began planning for the inaugural summer of a new interfaith and intercultural programme here in Mississauga and Brampton, the Peel Interfaith Peace Camp. My dream was to create a day camp for children and teens from different religious faith traditions in our region, to learn more about our neighbours, and to build friendships and peace within our community. Our Solel Synagogue formed an enthusiastic partnership with St. Peter’s Erindale (Canon Jennifer Reid) and Masumeen Islamic Centre of Brampton (Sheikh Jaffer H. Jaffer).

July 31- August 3, 2017 was an amazing week of learning, fun, and new friendships! On the first day we created a peace garden, with symbols representing our faith traditions, and that each camper added to with something special about herself or himself. Each day we visited one of the faith centres – Masumeen Islamic Centre, Solel Synagogue, and to St. Peter’s Anglican church – to learn about each faith tradition. Our teen counselors led fun activities and games, and campers enjoyed doing arts and crafts based on our theme for the week – tzedakah, zadaqa, charity. Our week also included service learning projects to give back to the community – we had visitors from Trillium Health partners, Mississauga Food Bank, and Mississauga Parks.

Throughout the week, both campers and staff built friendships and understanding with peers. We enjoyed getting to know each other on a personal level as we learned that people from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions share similar values, beliefs and traditions, asked lots of questions and had fun making new friends. Through our shared experiences we laid the groundwork for friendship and building peace and understanding in our community, between people from different cultural and religious traditions.

At the end of the week we celebrated with an evening family potluck featuring a slide show, greetings from our government representatives, and delicious food from each camper’s cultural heritage.

My favorite part of the week was experiencing the excitement of our own Solel campers, as they proudly and confidently led their new friends on a tour of Solel, answering questions and explaining Jewish life and traditions to their fellow campers.

We are very excited to start planning for next summer! In addition, at the dinner, many families expressed interest in creating opportunities for adults to learn and build relationships, so we are looking forward to creating joint programming for adults and families.

Thanks to our amazing volunteer staff, for creating an amazing and impactful experience – the logistics and organizing, budgeting, programming, arts and crafts, games, healthy and delicious snacks, meals, buses. Some of these volunteers were on site and some did lots of work behind the scenes. From Solel I am particularly grateful to our team: Carol Shiffman, Logan Smith, Aviva Tamari, Arliene Botnick, Romina Loeffler-Goodman, Rachel DeAbreu, Robbin Botnick, Mark Botnick, and Jennifer Weinman.

Our thanks to Rebecca Zaidi for the great photos.

And, our profound gratitude to Rabbi Debra Dressler, Shahin Pardhan and Pastor Charlene Jongejan Harder, who established the London Interfaith Peace Camp on which our camp is modeled, for their support and inspiration.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Audrey S. Pollack

Some pictures from camp:

Peace Garden

Peace Garden

The Faith Leaders

The Faith Leaders

Campers
Campers
Campers

 

Rabbi Pollack and Rabbi Dressler

Rabbi Audrey Pollack with Rabbi Debra Dressler of the London Interfaith Peace Camp

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