JCM Conference 2024
What is home?

5 - 11 February 2024
​Haus Wasserburg, Vallendar
According to the UN, more people are currently refugees than ever before. Natural disasters such as drought, floods, fires and volcanic eruptions are some of the reasons that force people to leave their homes. But there are also human causes, such as wars, conflicts, persecution for political, religious or cultural reasons. This always involves a great element of injustice, discrimination and contempt for humanity play a major role. If you look at their history, the three Abrahamic religions have always been confronted with persecution and eviction. And even today, religious minorities are confronted with the pressure to leave their homeland.

But what exactly is it - "home"? Is there a universal concept of home or does every religion, every culture, every society have its own definition of it? What does it mean to leave home and what does it mean to come home?
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JCM Conference 2024 will explore from an interreligious, intercultural perspective-starting with the question of what home means-which answers the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions have to the loss of home. In a further step, we will explore the question of how we can work together to ensure that everyone can live in peace and freedom in their homeland.

JCM Conference 2023
50 years of JCM: Have we failed God? Interreligious dialogue as a Response to a Broken World

13 - 19 February 2023
​Haus Wasserburg, Vallendar
In the 1960’s, in the shadow of the Holocaust, Rabbi Lionel Blue and Pastor Winfried Maechler met and decided to establish a Jewish-Christian collaboration in an attempt to facilitate reconciliation between students and future leaders of both communities in Germany and England. This took the form of an annual conference in Germany. Soon after it was decided to broaden the scope of the conference to include the three monotheistic religions. With the first Muslim group joining in 1972, JCM conference was born.
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As JCM 2023 looked back at 50 years of encounter and dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims, the participants reflected on being painfully confronted with growing populisms, totalitarianism, human rights abuses, war crimes, abuse of the natural world and the use of religion to justify the unjustifiable. Together, conference participants asked themselves what have they done as religious people in dialogue, what could they have done, and what should they do now and in the future to heal our broken world.