Bethlehem Fighting Hits Home in Cologne

"War is usually something we see on TV – it's far away," says Martin Verfürth, an elementary school principal in the Cologne suburb of Zündorf. "But now, the war and the suffering have a human face. We know some of the people who are affected personally and we are suffering with them."

In 1997, Martin Verfürth's school started a partnership program with a Lutheran school in Bethlehem. In those days, Israelis and Palestinians seemed on their way to a lasting peace agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, foreign minister Shimon Peres, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared a Nobel Peace Prize for signing the historic 1993 Oslo peace accords.

When the two schools began their contact, the students from Cologne and Bethlehem started exchanging e-mails regularly. They got to know one another through the internet and began sending each other tokens of their friendship.

The Cologne students sent pictures they'd painted to their partner school. They made cassette recordings of songs they sang in music class and sent them to Bethlehem. And they sent over the traditional German Advent calendars in the weeks before Christmas.

"We sent examples of our life and our culture here to our partners in Bethlehem. And of course, we also got a lot back from them," Martin Verfürth explains.

No word from Bethlehem

But the Cologne schoolchildren haven't heard from their friends in the West Bank for weeks. The kids in Bethlehem haven't been able to attend school since a strict curfew was imposed over the city.

"They're sitting at home and can't go out on the street," Viola Rahed explained to the kids in Cologne. Viola is the principal of Bethlehem's Lutheran elementary school. On a recent visit to Germany, she visited her partner school in Cologne.

The school principal from Bethlehem answered questions the German children had about the impact of the conflict. How are the children at our partner school coping? How do people get food if they can't leave their houses? What's happened to the school garden that we helped plant in Bethlehem?

Viola Rahed's answers helped the elementary school children understand the conflict better. But the news she brought from Bethlehem wasn't always good news.

The saplings, for instance, which the schoolkids from Zündorf had bought for the Bethlehem school garden, have been ploughed under by Israeli tanks. At the beginning of this month, Israeli soldiers stormed Bethlehem's Lutheran church and destroyed large parts of the complex.

Letters of encouragement

When the schoolchildren in Zündorf heard that the Israeli military had occupied the school, they sent letters of encouragement to the students in Bethlehem.

"It was very important for our children to see that their friends here in Germany are thinking of them," Viola Rahed told the children in Cologne. "It's good to know that someone is thinking of them and that they're not all alone in this world."

She hopes that there will be more people who build bridges to the people of Bethlehem.

Martin Verfürth, the principal of the Zündorf elementary school is definitely one who wants to keep the partnership between the two schools alive. "I've got dedicated teachers, dedicated parents and most of all: dedicated students."

With their help, he wants to raise money to replant the school garden of the Lutheran school in Bethlehem.

But no one knows when it will be possible to plant new trees of friendship.