Leading Shas and influential Palestinian...

The Geneva Initiative held a joint conference for 6 women affiliated with Israel's Shas party, including the daughter and granddaughter of the Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, and 6 influential Palestinian women. The women, who met in Bulgaria over the course of three days utilized the time spent together to share their histories, speak of the challenges each side encounters either as Palestinian religious women living under occupation or as traditional Israeli religious women and tried to address each other's grievances. They worked on understanding differences and finding commonalities between their situations and learned how to relate to one another. The seminar included a number of briefings, workshops and heated debates.

 

In order to enable the group to engage in an ongoing dialogue process over a number of days the seminar took place in Bulgaria. A shorter follow-up session for seminar participants is planned to take place in Jerusalem during September.