September 8, 2025
This email series highlights voices of peace from around the world, to help you find yours.
This month’s Voice of Peace is Sharon Rosen, Search’s former director of religious engagement. Sharon retired earlier this year.
I have lived in this holy, conflicted city—this beautiful Jerusalem—for over forty years. From my home which overlooks the Old City, I hear the muezzin call, the bells ring from the neighboring convent, and the singing of Jewish prayers. However, since October 7, 2023, and particularly in recent weeks, my ears have been overwhelmed by sirens alerting me to incoming rockets and urging me to run for shelter. I ask myself, “Why are the skies here open to warfare but not to bringing people together to build peace? Why is religion so often abused as a tool for conflict?”
Religion has always played a central role in my life and is core to my identity. Psalm 34’s call to “seek peace and pursue it” is now my life’s mantra. My religion informs my thoughts and actions, my awareness and appreciation of life’s gifts, and my commitment to stay the course, however challenging.
As I grew older, I began learning about other religions and practices and realized that there are diverse ways to finding one’s spiritual path. Still, it was only after my experience living in apartheid South Africa and then in Ireland during the bitter “Troubles” that I truly understood the universal message found at the very start and heart of the Bible—that every human being is created in the Divine image, regardless of race, color, religious or ethnic background. While we are different and have diverse experiences, we can all follow our chosen paths to create a more caring, compassionate, and just world.
When I began working in Search for Common Ground’s Jerusalem office twenty years ago as part of a team of Palestinians and Israelis, I felt I had come home. Search’s values of hope, empathy, tenacity, and inclusion strongly mirrored my own. I started by directing an initiative to reduce tensions around Jerusalem’s highly contentious shared sacred spaces. We worked with religious actors in the region—with the tacit support of their political leaders—to unite around a declaration that respects the attachments of each religion to its holy sites, and to set up a mechanism to protect them. While that task—still so sorely needed—clearly failed, it led the way to Search’s major role in creating a Universal Code of Conduct on Holy Sites which has been successfully implemented in places as far afield as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nigeria, and Mount Zion, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.
While not a faith-based organization, Search has always engaged with religious actors. Given its many activities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where religious beliefs are so central to people’s identities, Search could not be successful without doing so. In 2017, my appointment as director of religious engagement globally enabled us to develop the tools, workshops, and a comprehensive program to do this strategically. Religious engagement is not just about interfaith dialogue. Search catalyzes the power of religious actors, in collaboration with others, to bring about positive, sustained change in places of conflict while ensuring that they have the tools to be a force for peace.
I’m very proud that Search has become a prominent and highly regarded player in advancing religious freedom—often with a focus on women and young people—in over twenty countries such as Nigeria, Iraq, Kenya, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, among others. Engaging religious actors together with state authorities, we have strengthened religious freedom in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and have worked with senior religious leaders in Sri Lanka and Israel to advance religious pluralism in schools.
So, to those who say Search must steer clear of religion if it wants to reduce violent conflict, I argue the opposite: if we do not want religion to be abused and part of the problem, we must ensure that it is part of the solution. Many religious actors are committed to peace. Their voices must be amplified to reduce the growing weaponization of religion, as we are seeing in the Middle East, which advances a “God is on my side” attitude and which, in turn, sparks violent conflict.
Jerusalem is a city of beauty and of pain—a city that has the potential to be a beacon of light for the billions who hold it dear. Its three-thousand-year turbulent history attests to its tenacity and to human faith. I pray that the call of hope and the paths to peace prevail.
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Want to hear more from Sharon? Listen to this podcast she recorded recently with the London School of Jewish Studies.
