Christian and a Priest, I really am a Jew, I really am an Israeli and if I don’t feel I really am an Egyptian, I do at least feel very close to the Arabs who I know and love." Foundation of Neve Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam An earlier attempt had been made by two families of the St. James Association to build a Christian kibbutz, on land provided by the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion in Ein Kerem in the 1950s. Worries existed about the reactions of the nearby Arab villagers, and of the Israeli government, though the abbot of the Latrun monastery, Elie Corbisier, was enthusiastic. Hussar, assisted by letters to the Pope written by Rina Geftman, sought not the patronage, but formal authorisation for his projected Yishuv Neve Shalom from the then Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Alberto Gori (1949–1970), who was opposed to the plan. A feasibility study by the Patriarchate advised against the project, but Hussar and Corbisier went ahead, signing a lease on 6 November 1970, and implemented it, despite resistance from the new head of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, Monsignor Beltritti. NSWAS - the name came from a phrasing in Pope Paul VI's address bidding Israel's then president Zalman Shazar farewell on January 5, 1964- began to be developed on 400 dunams of land, under harsh pioneering conditions, by some ten members of the same group in 1970, though the first families only arrived in 1976. With the advent of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab families after 1976, and the moral and financial support of Friends of NSWAS in France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, the community began to grow. Wellesley Aron and his wife joined the village in 1980. Though prayer and reconciliation were considered fundamental from the beginning, a new tendency arose, as settlers showed more interest in justice and fraternity, and in social action, than religion. Hussar imposed from the very outset a politics of neutrality. Issues of identity nonetheless came to the fore as a central concern of the community, something which led to rifts, and indeed the abandonment of the project by one of its key founding members, Rina Geftman, in the 1980s. By 1984, the village had 70 members, equally divided between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. Mixed schools In the late 1990s, the Center established several Yad b’Yad (Hand in Hand) schools in Israel, aiming to encourage Jewish and Arab children to