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Dear JPB Family & Friends,
Thank you, shukran, toda for the outpouring of inspiring generosity in the midst of the violence devastating Israel and Palestine. Recent donations topped $290,000! This is almost triple the amount we typically receive each holiday season. Among the many loyal donors were dozens of new ones from across the globe.
Your record levels of support secure top-quality, interfaith peace education for exceptional high-school educators and youth this summer. It is only by rebuilding trust and fostering open communication among Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs that inter-communal traumas can be healed and reconciliation advanced. This is the purpose of every JPB program: to give participants the skills, relationships, and experiences to be effective agents of positive change. Yours is the powerful gift of agency, and at JPB our hearts are brimming with gratitude.
The daily reports of the horrific realities in Israel and Palestine make most of us feel powerless, nauseated, and depressed. Each day the atrocities and death toll mount, and there seems little we can do to end the madness. And yet there is.
Sharing the invaluable gift of agency through generosity benefits more than JPB’s many adult and youth participants: it empowers the givers too. Supporting JPB’s interfaith peace education with prayer, volunteering, and donations is a very real way to influence the peoples of Israel and Palestine with good. A mentor often said to me, “If you want lumber, you must plant trees.” This surely is the case with new leadership and change in the Holy Lands. JPB's is a long-term peace mission but is a very real one with very real positive impact.
The powerful gift of agency: thank you for generously sharing it with Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others in the Holy Lands. You are changing lives and planting future presidential timber. In doing so, you have become an agent of positive change supporting a peace that only prayer, volunteering, and generosity can secure.
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