November 17, 2025 – A delegation including Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU), Georgetown University, and Tel Aviv University participated in the Middle Meets academic and cultural dialogue initiative at the Vatican last week. 

Middle Meets brings together Jewish and Arab students from Israel and across the world for in-depth discussions on conflict, dialogue, and peacebuilding. The current seminar, held in collaboration with Scholas Occurrentes, the Vatican’s global education network, focuses on the questions of how to build trust, hope, and cooperation in the aftermath of war.  

Founded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Entrepreneurship Club in the Faculty of Humanities, Middle Meets is a series of facilitated, proactive dialogues between Jewish and Israeli Palestinian college students, developed in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Middle Meets participants include several dozen students from diverse academic backgrounds in Israel, as well as American students. 

The group met with Pope Leo XIV and Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, Head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue. During their Vatican meetings, the students shared personal reflections on the complexities of life during wartime, as well as their shared commitment to fostering a language of hope, reconciliation, and mutual responsibility. The Georgetown students were from the Conflict Transformation Lab and led by Prof. Rachel Milner Gillers. 

According to HU Prof. Bar-Asher Siegal, “At a time when academia is losing its capacity to serve as a public square for open, safe, and honest debate, this group of young students from around the world did something that is, sadly, no longer trivial: they bravely chose to grapple together with the hardest, most painful questions of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the tensions within American society. It’s a privilege to stand with a cohort this courageous.” 

Middle Meets is funded by American donors David and Alison Ullendorff, in honor of a beloved relative who studied at HU after escaping Nazi Germany in 1938.