BERLIN, Dec. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AJC and the German Ministry of Defense will celebrate 15 years of partnership at a ceremony, in Berlin, on December 8. German Defense Minister Dr. Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg and AJC Executive Director David Harris will address the event.

The AJC-Bundeswehr relationship is a remarkable story of a global Jewish advocacy organization and the German military jointly striving to build a better future, while preserving the memory of the tragic past. The Bundeswehr is the German Armed Forces.

Founded by German Jews in 1906, AJC was the first American Jewish organization to reach out to Germany after the Holocaust. While Israeli-German relations developed quickly, Diaspora Jewish groups, with one notable exception, were several steps behind.

"From the start, the one exception was the American Jewish Committee," says David Harris, who has headed the organization since 1990, and established AJC's Berlin Office in 1998. "Not only did it not lag behind, but, to the contrary, it took the lead in its understanding of Germany's dynamic postwar history."

AJC recognized the vast strides made by Germany in facing its past, building a democratic society based on the rule of law, serving as an anchor of NATO, seeking to create a European Germany rather than a German Europe, and reaching out to the Jewish world and Israel.

Reflecting the strength of the AJC-German relationship, Chancellor Merkel addressed AJC's Centennial Annual Meeting in Washington in 2006.

Significantly, a core element of the relationship was the joint decision in 1994, just five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to establish a cooperative partnership between AJC and the Bundeswehr. It has evolved as a model relationship of ongoing education and dialogue, and of cooperation in humanitarian projects.

Numerous German military delegations visit AJC headquarters in New York annually for conversations about Germans and Jews, the Middle East, and transatlantic relations. David Harris and Deidre Berger, director of AJC's Berlin Office, regularly lecture at defense colleges in Germany.

In 1999, AJC partnered with the Bundeswehr to deliver medical equipment to Muslim refugees from Kosovo who were living in a refugee camp operated by the German military in Macedonia.

Following the ceremony in Berlin, AJC and the Bundeswehr will host a symposium on "Transatlantic Partnership and the Mideast - Shaping Future Security Policy in the Region."

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Christoph Heusgen, foreign policy advisor to Chancellor Merkel. U.S. Ambassador to Germany Phillip D. Murphy will deliver greetings. Symposium panelists will include Christian Schmidt, State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Defense; Emmanuel Nahshon, Deputy Chief of Mission, Israeli Embassy, Berlin; and AJC's David Harris. The panel will be moderated by Sylke Tempel, Editor-in-Chief of Internationale Politik, Germany's leading foreign affairs journal.

SOURCE American Jewish Committee

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