BY RUTH SILVERMAN | Composer Marvin Hamlisch has a suggestion for Middle Eastern leaders, who wound up round-the-clock discussions at the White House Wednesday. He’d like them to turn to a group of teenagers to get the stalled peace talks moving.
Funded in part by the Elie Wiesel Foundation, the group, called Seeds of Peace, brings together 150 kids, ages 13 to 15, from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Morocco, for one month each summer in Boston and at Camp Androscoggin in Maine, to foster understanding.
In their month together, they argue, discuss and wrestle with issues that have stumped their elders for generations, but they also take time to have fun and learn about one another, and they discover they are more alike than not.
When President Clinton, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hand on the White House lawn, the kids were there to present them with T-shirts bearing the Seeds of Peace logo.
Hamlisch is so excited by the program that he has given them a song. He plans to play it when he becomes the first performer to appear at the opening of the new North Short Center for Performing Arts in Skokie on Nov. 7.
“They can use it any time,” says Hamlisch, of One Song, written with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. “It’s king of like an anthem for everybody.”
Hamlisch says he first learned of the group from Israeli U.N. Consul Gen. Collete Avital at her New York home. He says, “the knee-jerk reactions they are usually taught are very wrong. They don’t have to grow up hating one another. When you see them getting to know each other, it’s wonderful.”
“It won’t change the world tomorrow, or in the next five years, but maybe in the next 15 or 20 years,” he says. “You can legislate, ‘Don’t kill,’ but you can’t legislate, ‘Why not?’ You must get to the grass roots.”