“It was calm, and it was peaceful,” was Daniel Friesen’s impression of New Ammim, located in northern Israel, when he was in the country. The secondary-school graduate was traveling on a learning tour with Cologne’s Evangelical Church congregation Kartäuserkirche and stayed at the Christian village Nes Ammim’s hotel.
“As a guest you can tell that people act as a community here,” says the young Cologne resident. And because this made such a lasting impression on him, he will become a part of this community himself in August and serve as an international youth volunteer in Nes Ammim for a year.
A “sign of the peoples”
This morning Daniel Friesen is talking with other young adults at the Richard-Martin-Haus in Hilchenbach in the Siegerland region who are also planning to serve or who have already served as volunteers in Nes Ammim. They have come together at the conference center with Gerlinde Butzphal, chair of the German Nes Ammim Association, for an induction seminar.
The name “Nes Ammim” is Hebrew and means “sign of the peoples”. And this is what the village, founded by Europeans at the beginning of the 1960s as a sign of lived peace work, is intended to be. After the horrors of national socialism this is to be a place of active reconciliation work between Christians and Jews, Europeans and Israelis.
Gardening, technical support, hotel service