Inter Faith Week activities

This week is is Inter Faith Week which has the aim of: strengthening good inter faith relations at all levels; increasing awareness of the different and distinct faith communities in the UK, in particular celebrating and building on the contribution which their members make to their neighbourhoods and to wider society; and increasing understanding between people of religious and non-religious beliefs. This year I am having the opportunity to be part of several initiatives/activities that either connect with or are part of Inter Faith Week.

My week began with the opening the online exhibition, Exodus & Exile: Migration Themes in Biblical Images, that I have curated for The Ben Uri Gallery and a related essay entitled Debt Owed to Jewish Refugee Art.

The exhibition, which is currently Exhibition of the Week, includes a range of Biblical images from the Ben Uri Collection in order to explore migration themes through consideration of the images, the Bible passages which inspired them and the relationship between the two. This is because themes of identity and migration feature significantly in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and images from these Bibles are a substantive element of the Ben Uri Collection.

The combination of images and texts enables a range of different reflections, relationships and disjunctions to be explored. The result is that significant synergies can be found between the ancient texts and current issues. In this way, stories and images which may, at first, appear to be describing or defining specific religious doctrines can be seen to take on a shared applicability by exploring or revealing the challenges and changes bound up in the age-old experience of migration.

My essay Debt Owed to Jewish Refugee Art is an updated version of an article I originally wrote for Church Times looking at influential works by émigré Jewish artists that were under threat. The article mentions Ervin Bossanyi, Naomi Blake, Ernst Müller-Blensdorf, Hans Feibusch, and George Mayer-Marton, telling stories of the impact of migration on the work and reputations of these artists.

Yesterday, I spent the day at Beauchamps High School and Sixth Form College in Wickford taking part in their Inter Faith Week activities with a group representing Buddhism, Hinduism, Humanism, Islam, and Judaism. We each made presentations and took questions regarding our faiths and beliefs with four different classes in the morning before then taking part in a panel discussion in the afternoon with the whole of the Sixth Form. This was the second time of involvement for me in these activities. It is always a fascinating and interesting day with insights from the other belief representatives and challenging but thoughtful questions from the students.

Today, I am at an Inter Faith Retreat with rabbis and Church of England priests. We are exploring similarities in our chosen vocations as religious leaders to our communities through scriptural encounters and discussions of both our respective histories and current issues. As a result, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with Rabbi David Hulbert. Together with Imam Dr. Mohammed Fahim, Rabbi David and I led an East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land. My reports from this trip and some of my subsequent talks and sermons can be found here.

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Menachem Creditor - Olam Chesed Yibaneh.