Source: JPost
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/4779
For the first time, an American rabbi will be traveling to Iran Tuesday on a mission of interfaith dialogue and understanding.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the early forces behind the Jewish Renewal movement in America, will co-lead a delegation of 21 peace activists to the Islamic Republic on a mission "to humanize the face of Iran, lest we end up with a disaster of global proportions we cannot imagine," she told The Jerusalem Post by phone on Monday.
Gottlieb, a longtime peace activist and recent cofounder of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Non-Violence, said her participation in the mission came out of Tuesday's threat by Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton that an Iranian assault on Israel would be met with an American response that would "obliterate" Iran.
"It is important to negotiate and not threaten obliteration," Gottlieb believes, "in particular because there are between 30,000 and 40,000 Jewish people living in Iran, the oldest extant Jewish community in the Middle East, which has been there since the first exile in 586 BCE."
The mission, the fifth "friendship and solidarity delegation" to Iran of the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), is coordinated on the Iranian side with the Iranian Center for Interfaith Dialogue, described by FOR as "an official entity committed to supporting interaction between different religious communities."