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Founded in the Shadow of the Holocaust

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Founded in the Shadow of the Holocaust

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The International Council of Christians and Jews exists because of what Christian teaching had, for centuries, allowed to be said about Jews, and because in the years after 1945 that history could no longer be treated as a private matter internal to either community. Delegates gathered in Oxford in August 1946, barely a year after the war's end, to build a standing international body for Jewish-Christian dialogue directly in response to the Holocaust. The founding conference was followed a year later by a second meeting at Seelisberg, Switzerland, which produced the Ten Points of Seelisberg, a statement naming and rejecting the specific strands of Christian preaching, that Jews bear collective guilt for the death of Christ chief among them, that historians and theologians came to call the teaching of contempt.

The organization the Oxford and Seelisberg conferences built has grown into an umbrella coordinating roughly three dozen national Jewish-Christian dialogue councils worldwide, headquartered in Heppenheim, Germany, fittingly in the former home of the philosopher Martin Buber, whose own work on dialogue between self and other shaped much of the field's vocabulary. In 1995 the Council extended its founding bilateral mission by establishing the Abrahamic Forum, bringing Muslim participants into a conversation that had begun, half a century earlier, as a reckoning between only two traditions.

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International Council of Christians and Jews (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia Foundation, 2026View the Source
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