The Jerusalem Inter-Cultural Center Blog

On October 12 2009, we began our yearly Arabic courses at the JICC. This year, the beginners’ courses (two groups) started in October with the teacher Suha Kadri, while the intermediate and advanced courses started in mid-November, due to a maternity leave of the teacher Saeeda Subhi. These two excellent teachers have been working with us for four years, allowing us to offer probably the best and most extensive spoken Arabic courses in the city.

First day of Arabic Beginners Course - October 12 2009

The JICC is NOT a language school. Our courses are primarily intended for professionals and volunteers who are required to speak and understand Arabic in their daily work. We are the first city in Israel that claims that Arabic is a MUST for such professionals. This may sound obvious, right? But it is not the case in most parts of Israel.

When we began our courses we could hardly fill the beginners’ course, and there were not enough candidates for the more advanced courses. We opened one beginners’ course and one small intermediate course. Two years ago, we had three full courses - beginners, intermediate and advanced. Last year, the waiting list for the beginners’ course was so long that we were forced to open another course. This year, we had to add a second intermediate course. Altogether, we now have two beginners’ courses, two intermediate courses and one large advanced course (and, we won’t be surprised if next year we will have to expand the advanced course as well…).

We are very pleased to note the increase in interest in these courses and we are sorry for those who did not have a place in the current year and need to wait for next year. It is important to note that the courses are highly subsidized by the Jerusalem Foundation, who shares with us the vision of Arabic as a mandatory language for those who work with Arab population.

We started today a new series of Cultural Competence trainings to staff members in the Alyn hospital in Jerusalem. We have facilitated three such trainings before in Alyn, mainly focusing on the out-patient clinics. The new series focuses on the in-patient rehabilitation department staff. These efforts are part of our program, together with the Alyn Hospital’s management, to transform Alyn into a cultural competent hospital, the first of its kind in Israel. The work with Alyn is a component of the Jerusalem Cultural Competence in Health Project initiated by the Jerusalem Inter-Cultural Center and the Jerusalem Foundation.

In addition to adapting the training to the rehab department - using simulations and role playing cases that were developed specifically for this department, we also upgraded our methodology; we now use cases throughout the workshop as triggers for discussion on theoretical and practical knowledge and tools. We find this new approach to be much more effective in delivering the training’s input to participants, and in fact, it is also time-saving. It also serves to bridge between different proficiencies - as the participants come from various professional backgrounds - physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, administrative staff, etc. In the new model much of the training is based on events the participants share with us - and these, of course, are very meaningful to them.

Alyn Cultural Competence Training November 25, 2009

We received excellent feedback from the workshop and in the coming months we plan to deliver a few more such workshops to additional staff members of this department.

Exactly one year ago, the Community Center director of the Gilo neighborhood, Yaffa Shitrit, and the neighborhood’s community organizer, Naama, visited us at the JICC and asked for our help in creating a community dialogue process in Gilo. In the year that followed, we helped them to begin with in forming an active steering committee that would lead the process and define the need and approach for a community dialogue process in the neighborhood.

The process was based on several years of groundwork for empowering local activists. While participating in a Community Dialogue course at the JICC in 2004, Yaffa presented a unique and novel course-design that would bring professional staff and community leaders together in teams. Since then she has been developing and implementing these courses in Gilo, and their graduates now became the solid base for the current large-scale community dialogue process in the neighborhood.

From month to month, under the impressive leadership of the Community Center’s staff, both the group of activists and the agenda for the process took form. During this process the activists formulated the agenda and title for the first community gathering: “How are WE going to Transform Gilo to Our Dream Neighborhood - Attractive, Fun and with Excellent Quality of Life”.

The Invitation and Title of the Open Space Event

On November 16, the process was put to the test. An Open Space Technology event was conducted, based on the impressive marketing abilities of the steering committee. When we first talked about this event we assumed it might attract 150 participants. Well, 360 actually came !!!

The Open Space Assembly

After the introductions to the evening, working groups were formed, according to participants’ passion and leadership. The groups first discussed their topics and then focused on initiatives that they now took the responsibility to promote. Some of the groups were big - around 60 participants; others were small - 20, 5 or even 2 participants. But in an Open Space event - the size does not matter. The discussion summaries from all the groups were gathered toward a booklet of insights and initiatives that will be produced and distributed in the neighborhood. The air was full of energy.

One of the Open Space Groups

The Community Center took upon itself the responsibility to help the residents and activists in promoting their initiatives. This will be the next phase of this community dialogue process.

After the workshops at the Clalit primary care clinics at Ir Ganim and Talpiot, we continued this week with two half-day trainings for the staff of the Gonenim clinic, conducted at the JICC premises on Mount ZIon. These three clinics serve most of the Ethiopian Jewish immigrant population in Jerusalem, and we adapted our cultural competence training to focus on the needs of this group. All clinic staff members, from physicians to administrative staff, attended the workshop, as we see the response to diversity at the clinic as an integrative task.

Gonenim Clinic Training 2009

The workshop was in general very similar to the ones we conducted before. However, we used many more examples, which participants in the previous workshops raised, and based the training on case studies and simulations. This made the training closely related to the practical issues brought up by clinic staff members.

Gonenim Clinic Training 2009 - roleplaying

Following this training the Gonenim clinic now joins the support system we are creating to enhance the Clalit Health Services’ capacity in providing better and more adapted services to new immigrants. We will conduct follow-up meetings with the clinic’s management and mentor them in implementing Cultural Competence in the clinic.

Gonenim Clinic Training 2009 - roleplaying

As a part of our project that aims to incorporate cultural competence into the Jerusalem medical system, we are working with the secondary care clinics of the Clalit medical services. It is a long process in which we are facilitating a day-long workshops to staff of these clinics from all over Jerusalem. The first training in the series was held on June 30, 2009.

Role-playing at the Cultural Competence training for Clalit Secondary Care Staff

Today we held the second training. In between these two trainings, we significantly upgraded the workshop, based on the feedback we received after the first workshop. We also developed improved case studies for the simulation and role-playing parts. By the end of the workshop today we felt that the workshop in its current version is fit for replication. The special component of the workshop is the simulation of cross-cultural cases with the help of professional actors. The cases mainly demonstrate interactions with Arab patients and with Ultra-Orthodox and Ethiopian Jewish patients.

Role-playing at the Cultural Competence training for Clalit Secondary Care Staff

The plan is to train in the coming two years all the staff in the Clalit secondary care clinics in Jerusalem. In parallel, we work to assimilate cultural competency in the clinics in additional ways, such as training bilingual interpreters, improving communication between primary-care Arabic-speaking physicians and the secondary-care physicians, etc.

Summer 2009 was very dense with issues related to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community in Jerusalem. One issue was around the opening on Saturday of a public parking lot in close proximity to the old city. Another major case was the arrest of a Haredi mother who allegedly starved and hurt her son for more than a year. Every weekend throughout the summer, Haredis rioted in their neighborhoods and near the parking lot. Also, throughout the week of the arrest of the Haredi mother, the Haredi neighborhoods were on riots, and municipality services were prevented from approaching them. Specifically, welfare services did not function for several weeks as a result of the Haredi community blaming them for being active in the arrest of the mother.

The JICC has become the main mediating agent in these conflicts. It was our work during the week when the mother was arrested that enabled all sides to sit together and achieve a solution that allowed the riots to stop. Since then, we have been working closely with all sides to respond to the many conflicting issues, which could each develop into a full blown crisis. We were involved in the court discussions, in the children’s interrogation, in the mother’s visits of the relevant child etc.

This story is not over yet. As we write this post, during Succot Hol Hamoed, we are handling another crisis around the Welfare Department’s involvement in the case.  We observed professional people on all sides who act according to their best professional judgment in this case. However, in a complex culturally-sensitive environment, the usual best professional practices are not always best for the situation at hand - and we try to help all sides to redefine what would cultural competent professional work mean in their respective areas - health, welfare etc. The story was covered on a Jerusalem Post article on July 23, when our work on this issue just begun. We hope that when the issue is resolved, we will be able to write the full story as an important case study for the need for cultural competency in all services.

In the case of the Karta parking lot, we were also involved in most of the negotiations and with the efforts that allowed the “ceasefire” in September. We are still involved, together with the highest officials at the municipality, police and Haredi community, in the endeavors to calm the issues for the future.

Altogether, we must admit that with all these unfortunate and difficult events, this was a very interesting and fruitful summer for us. We accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience and demonstrated our important role and significant contribution in the city. Most important - we created even better contacts and relationships with the innermost circles of the Haredi community. A clear outcome of this development is that at present, whenever problems are about to erupt, all sides call us to intervene - it took us 10 years to acquire this legitimacy in Jerusalem!

We just published an article, together with the Alquds Dialogue Center, at Search for Common Ground (SFCG) Newservice, on our model for resident participation in East Jerusalem. Here are the links and the text:

SFCG: English, Arabic, Hebrew.

PDF (English).

Text:

03 September 2009

JERUSALEM - All over the western world, community empowerment programmes encourage resident participation by involving community leaders and organisers in decisions about the city in which they live. What could be better than the authorities and residents coming together to take joint responsibility for municipal challenges? It seems that in East Jerusalem, all this is not so straightforward.

For those who aren’t familiar with East Jerusalem, the Palestinian residents living in this part of the city constitute a third of its population. Their neighbourhoods and villages have been neglected for years by the Israeli establishment. In fact, significant discrepancies between East and West Jerusalem exist in every area of life.

In theory, the Palestinians could take action and change their situation. Most of them hold permanent residency rights and are eligible to vote in municipal elections and run for municipal office. They can also join a variety of frameworks that would allow them to influence municipal institutions such as parent committees, activist groups working to improve infrastructure together with municipal officials, committees within community administrations which encourage resident involvement and more.

Yet their level of involvement is very minimal. Instead, frustration and despair, and, to a large extent, passivity and acceptance of the situation have taken over. However, if we speak to residents across the city, we will discover that they are very aware of their rights and obligations. In order not to lose their residency rights, they pay municipal taxes consistently (if they don’t pay this tax, they could lose proof of residency within the city boundaries) and are very keen to realise their rights to healthcare, education, housing etc.

There are many reasons for their lack of involvement. First, any cooperation on the part of the residents with the Israeli authorities may be construed as a stamp of approval for the continuing occupation. Secondly, the various arms of the Israeli establishment discourage leadership in Jerusalem which “could get out of hand”. And third, regional and local chaos generates a sense that circumstances are determined by events that are beyond their control. As a result, the dominant approach is to refrain from involvement, while waiting for an outside source to come and save them.

So when seeds of a new approach emerge it is important to take note. For example, in the neighbourhood of Tsur Baher, which is a village in the southeast of Jerusalem, a group of residents came together a few years ago and set up a “committee supporting education”. The committee works to improve the educational systems in the village which are operated by various elements – the Jerusalem municipality, the Islamic Waqf, UNRWA etc.

Instead of waiting for change, the group held a week of educational activities in the village, the pinnacle of which was a day of discussions in the form of “an open space meeting”, which was moderated by the Jerusalem Intercultural Center. The event was widely attended by local residents, principals, teachers, students and key figures in the area of education in the village and beyond, including senior education officials from the municipality.

In other cities this would not constitute anything new but in Jerusalem an initiative led by residents of the eastern neighbourhoods is rare and many people within the establishment were surprised by its success.

What was novel about the event was the statement that informed the whole event: “We are partners to the change that has to happen in the village”. Instead of just accusing the authorities and demanding that they take action and allocate resources, there was a request to look for joint solutions – to be shared by both the authorities and the residents.

In a city like Jerusalem, this kind of development tends to give rise to a great deal of suspicion. The education administration within the municipality which is responsible for East Jerusalem panicked because collaboration with residents is no small nuisance for a dysfunctional system. In the village itself there were voices calling to boycott any dialogue with the municipality which is part of the apparatus that serves the occupation. There were quite a few figures from both the village and the municipality who did not attend events organised by the residents – the necessary conceptual shift that they would have needed to make was too far-reaching, at least for now.

To overcome these suspicions, the activists turned to two organisations to mediate between them and the establishment: the “Al Quds Dialogue Center”, which is a Palestinian Jerusalem-based organisation, and the “Jerusalem Intercultural Center”, a pan-cultural Jerusalem-based organisation. On the one hand these organisations work to persuade the establishment that collaborative efforts with the residents will assist in the provision of services. On the other hand, for the residents, they help clarify the distinction between collaborative efforts on the one hand, and accepting the occupation and cooperating with its messages, on the other.

The process makes for a very delicate balancing act in an extremely sensitive political climate. The tense atmosphere gives rise to mutual suspicions. Are the groups of activists what Israel calls “a hostile terror-supporting organisation” or are they “collaborators, agents of the Israeli occupation”? These suspicions have concrete implications. Any mistake could put the activists in harms way. Therefore, mediating organisations are extremely important in making a collaborative effort possible.

Education in Tsur Baher is just one example. Similar initiatives are beginning to emerge in other neighbourhoods and areas of life such as rubbish disposal, a mother and baby centre in the village of Silwan, Arabic translations of municipal forms, pedestrian crossings and road safety programmes for school children.

We hope we are witnessing the development of a new model for the advancement of the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, a mechanism that can improve their quality of life until a permanent and just solution is found for the city and the region as a whole. Perhaps also this type of model could be implemented in other places in the world which share a reality similar to that which exists in Jerusalem.

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* Fuad Abu-Hamed, a resident of Tsur Baher, is the chairperson of the Alquds Dialogue Center (http://alquds-dc.org), a businessman and a social activist. He can be reached at bsafafa@zahav.net.il . Dr. Hagai Agmon-Snir is the director of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center ( JICC, http://JICC.org.il) and can be reached at hagai@jicc.org.il. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

During summer 2008 we developed our first Cultural Competency in Health training. Since then, we piloted the workshop, adapted it as necessary, and implemented it with medical staff at the Alyn hospital and at the Clalit Health Services (both in Primary Care Clinics serving the Ethiopian community and in expert clinics). This was done in partnership with the Jerusalem Foundation. Throughout this process, we got tremendous help from many experts from all over Israel - physicians, nurses, management of the relevant institutes, and researchers and practitioners focusing on cultural sensitivity, awareness and competence. It was important for us to present the training to these people, hear their feedback and insights, and thank them for their valuable contribution.

On September 7, 2009, we were joined by about 20 experts at the JICC premises on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. We went through the details of the workshop in depth and shared with them our ideas for improvements. At midday, we, the cultural competence team at the JICC, felt much enriched with a lot of new ideas and advice. Some of the feedback related to specific modules and parts of the workshop, allowing for further improvement, and some contributed to the overall approach of the workshop.

For example, we realized that learning can be structured around case studies provided by the participants during the workshop, as well as cases that we prepared in advance with the help of professional actors. We now also know how to better simulate with the participants situations they describe, by applying the “Caregiver in the Shoes of the Patient” model: we ask the medical staff member who raised the case to play the role of the patient while another participant plays the role of the medical staff him/herself. Thus the theoretical and practical modules of the workshop, that previously were given as is, are now incorporated and triggered by the stories and situations raised by the participants, as well as by the pre-designed situations we prepared with the actors.

This approach makes the training much more interactive and practical, and most importantly, responsive and well connected to the needs of the participating practitioners. We discussed this new training design with today’s expert participants and they all agreed it was very promising.

On the week of October 26, 2008, we began another year of the language courses at the Arabic-Hebrew Studies Center (see what we wrote back then!!).

Today, the courses ended (except for the Hebrew course for Palestinians that will continue through August). We had a party to celebrate our efforts in learning Arabic and Hebrew in these intensive and not-that-easy classes.

Arabic/Hebrew Celebration

Most of the participants wanted to ensure that these important language trainings will also be provided next year. Indeed, thanks to the donors of the Jerusalem Foundation, we are able to assure this. Our approach, focusing on the needs of professionals, is well proven. This year we insisted that the Jewish participants, while learning the spoken dialect, will also learn to read basic Arabic - street signs, names and newspaper titles. This addition to the courses was most appreciated by the participants.

Graduates thank the Arabic and Hebrew teachers

The party was held, as usual, in our beautiful garden. This year it was well timed with our mulberry tree… It has the sweetest fruits in the city! From the informal conversations, as well as the formal speeches - all made in Arabic! - we could tell that the participants appreciate the Jerusalem Inter-Cultural Center as a unique organization in Jerusalem: A place where professionals, who devote themselves to the transformation of Jerusalem to a more just city for all its residents, can form relations and networks for their mutual benefit.

The Mulberry Tree