Interfaith Group Awarded Prize for Peace

Award ceremony, Jerusalem, June 22, 2015

The Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA), an organization dedicated to promoting peace in the Middle East through interfaith dialogue and cross-cultural study, was this week awarded the IIE Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace.

The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, was presented in Jerusalem by Victor J. Goldberg, a retired IBM executive who is a longtime Trustee of the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE) and who established and endowed the prize in 2005.

Representing the IEA were Yehuda Stolov and Salah Aladdin.  Dr. Stolov, IEA’s executive director, founded the Interfaith Encounter Association in 2001 in the belief that no political arrangement can be sustained over time without peaceful relations on the grassroots level.

Salah Aladdin serves in a consulting capacity as the assistant director of the Interfaith Encounter Association, where he began working as an accountant. He was the founder and facilitator of IEA’s second group, the Jerusalem Youth Interfaith Encounter. Aladdin currently works at the Ministry of Finance in Jerusalem and is a leader of Al-Razi, a non-profit society which assists outstanding students to continue their academic education.

In its mission statement, IEA states: “We believe that, rather than being a cause of the problem, religion can and should be a source of the solution for conflicts that exist in the region and beyond.”


Read the rest of this story on The Times of Israel.

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