Article July 5, 2004 Issue

STORIES THAT BUILD CONNECTIONS

Carol Grosman

Carol Grosman is a writer and storyteller living in Jerusalem who has worked many years in conflict resolution, focusing on the Middle East, the Balkans, inner cities in the United States, and Christian-Jewish relations. She is working on an interviewing project called, "Jerusalem Stories," using photographs from award-winning photographer Lloyd Wolf's collection.

My whole life I've loved stories and literature, and performing became a nexus for me. Over time my interest in personal stories and my work in conflict resolution began to converge in different ways, and I saw that no matter what the activity—sharing personal stories always provided a certain glue to the group that was very special.

We were doing a Jewish-Christian dialogue in the spring of 2002 in Jerusalem, and the closing event was a Friday night Jewish Sabbath service and Sabbath dinner. I asked the participants to tell stories, and a Palestinian Christian woman told me that this was the first Jewish service she had ever been to, but this wasn't the first time she'd been in the neighborhood. Today it's an Israeli neighborhood, but she had grown up in it many years before. During the 1948 war, a nearby building had been blown up, and she and her family fled from their home to another part of Jerusalem.

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