VIDEO: From 9/11 Aftermath Came "Hands of Peace"

This story is part of a Patch series examining the Muslim experience 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Read other stories in the series .

Like many after the World Trade Towers fell on 9/11, along with her sorrow and anguish, Glenview mom Gretchen Grad felt a call to action.

This month, as the , she and others can celebrate a decade of Hands of Peace, the non-profit she founded to foster mutual understanding among teens from Israel, the Palestinian territories and the U.S.

“In the aftermath of 9/11, I was seeing such fear and hostility emerging,” Grad said. “I found that very frustrating and had this compulsion to do something.”

WATCH: To see what Hands of Peace teens have to say about their experiences, watch the video to the right.

A former high school foreign exchange student who has kept in touch with her French host family, Grad said she decided to focus her efforts on teenagers and interfaith dialogue.

“It’s a formative age,” Grad said. “If nurtured, these really can be lifelong connections.”

'Life-changing' experience

Some 260 high school students — 150 from the Middle East — have now gone through the two and a half week summer program Grad devised, with 54 repeating for a second year in a leadership role.

Hands of Peace participants and their parents invariably describe it as “life-changing” for everyone, including Glenview families who host Jewish-Israelis, Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians.

For many Israelis, it’s their first time meeting another Palestinian teenager and vice versa, said Ibrahim Ghaith, a Palestininan from Hebron who was invited back to the program as an “extraordinary leader” a second time.

That first day, Palestinians and Israelis tend to stand grouped together, shy or intimidated to talk with one another, he said.

“You can tell the difference by the last day,” Ghaith said. “Everyone is crying and sad … devastated.”

After the students arrive, they participate in some initial ice-breakers and get-to-know games. But then they get into the heart of the program: two hours of daily dialogues sharing, sometimes shouting and crying and arguing about their experiences in the conflict region.

“You sit and talk with the other side about what happened, your feelings, anything that’s bothering you about the conflict,” Ghaith said. “You aren’t expecting an answer … but it’s something.”

Following the dialogue, the entire group does a field trip of some kind. Some are just fun like sightseeing in Chicago. They also do teambuilding workshops and, in a trip that can be challenging for some students, attend services at a mosque, synagogue and Christian church.

'A phenomenal change'

Mary Garvey said she initially had to do some “encouraging” to get her son Declan to sign up, because he already had a lot of commitments with two summer jobs and practice with the marching band drum line. But once he started the program, she said, he dropped everything and devoted himself to Hands of Peace.

“As soon as he got into it, it was obvious to him and us it was far and away the most worthwhile thing he’d ever been involved with,” said Garvey, whose Irish Catholic family hosted a 15-year-old Jewish Israeli participant, Noam Preminger.

“I observed really just a phenomenal change,” Emman Randazzo said of her son Michael Shihadeh, an American of Palestinian descent who connected strongly with teens both from her homeland and from Israel.

“The world is a larger place for him,” she said.

Making big personal shifts can also present challenges. At a recent reunion of the Americans who participated in Hands of Peace, Shihadeh and several other students described a newfound disconnect with their former friends, who don’t understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and whose concerns – playing video games and going out – now seem trivial to them.

“Most people are uneducated about many things, not just the Middle Eastern conflict,” said Noah Warshawsky, a Glenview participant who is Jewish. “It’s really hard to be with them … nobody else knows what we’ve gone through.”

High hopes

The number of participants has doubled to 40 since the program started, Grad said. It’s probably now as large as it can be in one location. When everyone — including sponsor families and Middle Eastern facilitators — gets together, there are more than 150 people. 

Executive director Julie Kanak and the board of directors has begun looking for a way to export the program to other places, to teach other people to conduct Hands of Peace.

“I absolutely think it’s a success in short- and long-term ways,” said Grad, noting that the first participants of the program are now choosing colleges and majors in diplomacy and international relations. Some Jewish Israeli students have gone to Cairo to study Arabic.

“I know these kids read headlines differently,” Grad said. “They are going to be different parents and raise their children to think critically about their own side’s role in the conflict.”

Ghaith, the Palestinian teen, has even higher hopes.

“Maybe one day the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian prime minister will be friends who met at Hands of Peace,” he said. “It could be the end of the conflict.”