40th anniversary celebrations at Parliament House
'Today, 40 years later, we are still walking towards mutual respect and understanding.'
The Council of Christians and Jews Victoria (CCJ) celebrated its 40th anniversary at a lunch at Victoria’s Parliament House on August 27, and a larger public event will be held at St Kilda Town Hall on November 12 to mark this significant milestone.
The lunch was co-hosted by Jewish MPs David Southwick and Paul Hamer, and was an intimate gathering of some of the longtime friends and supporters of CCJ.
Archdeacon Dr Colleen O’Reilly, co-chair of the CCJ (Vic), said that it was a “great privilege for us to be in this place,” and that celebrating the council’s 40th year is important because it “gives us an opportunity to mark our achievements in dialogue and in interfaith relations”.
One of the attendees was Sister Mary Lotton, who along with Rabbi John Levi, the late Sister Shirley Sedawie, the late Rabbi Ronald Lubofsky and a number of others, co-founded the council in 1985. The lunch was addressed by Tony Lupton, a former member of Parliament who was raised Catholic, and his wife, Jewish writer Julie Szego.
Councils of Christians and Jews trace their origins back to 1947, when, following the end of World War II, 65 Christians and Jews gathered in Seelisberg, Switzerland, for what they called “an Emergency Conference on Anti-Semitism”, which these days sounds eerily familiar. The goal was to create avenues for dialogue between Christians and Jews in order to avoid a repetition of what had just occurred during the war. The conference created what soon after became the International Council of Christians and Jews.
This was followed in 1965 by the Catholic Church’s Nostra Aetate declaration, and the World Council of Churches’ 1967 report on “The Church and the Jewish People”.
This prompted Jewish and Catholic leaders in Australia to act, and though there were a few false starts, the Council of Christians and Jews in Victoria finally formed in 1985.
The founders started a dialogue, and as Alex Kats, CCJ co-chair said at the lunch, “Today, 40 years later, we are still walking towards mutual respect and understanding.
“The council also continues to be a thought leader on some of the topics that both divide and unite us. In many ways, given the times that we find ourselves in now, this work is more important than it has ever been.”
CCJ Victoria was the first in Australia, and now there are branches in each major capital city, as well as a national umbrella organisation: the Australian Council of Christians and Jews.