St. Jude School media specialist Eleanora Straub attended the Anti-Defamation League Bearing Witness trip to Israel as one of  18 Catholic school representatives.

The group came from 10 states to study anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Catholic-Jewish relations. Their itinerary included visiting Christian and Jewish holy sites and meeting with Holocaust survivors, members of the Israeli government, Arab Israelis, Israeli journalists, Catholic dignitaries, Jewish community leaders, interfaith experts and scholars.  They also spent time with the Vatican’s ambassador to Israel, Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto.

“This is a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience for Catholic educators to experience first-hand the scope of Jewish life in today’s Israel,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director. “We hope that these educators will take these meaningful experiences of touching and feeling the history, coupled with a small immersion into contemporary Israeli society, back into their classrooms,” he said in a news release.

The educators represented middle and high schools in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri and California.

Since 1996, the program has trained more than 1,700 Catholic school educators across the U.S. about the historical relationship between the Jewish and Catholic communities and the impact of that relationship on Catholic teaching, catechesis and liturgy. The program is endorsed by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.