New York, NY, August 3, 2005 … A group of campus newspaper editors from the United States will be on the ground in Israel to witness the immediate impact of Gaza disengagement as part of a program designed to give college journalists an up-close look at the issues surrounding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The participants in the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) 2005 Albert Finkelstein Memorial Campus Editors Study Mission to Poland and Israel will tour Israel extensively and engage in a series of briefings with a broad spectrum of voices from Israeli and Palestinian perspectives.  The students will meet with working journalists, Israeli government officials, Palestinian representatives, and university students, among others.

Selected from dozens of applicants to the annual college journalism study program, the American students are slated to arrive in Israel on August 15, the day the Israeli government plans to move ahead with its disengagement from Gaza.

"This group of aspiring young journalists will have an opportunity not only to visit key historic sites of Israel's wars and the major religious sites of the Holy Land, but also to hear from an array of voices across the political and social spectrum on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.  "The students will also have a unique opportunity to witness Israel in a state of transition, as the Gaza disengagement is put in to effect."

The mission will depart from New York City on August 10, stopping first in Poland, where the students will visit the concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek and the areas once occupied by the Warsaw and Krakow ghettoes.  They will learn about traditional Jewish life in Europe and the events leading up to World War II that resulted in the annihilation of six million Jews in the Holocaust.  After their weeklong visit to Israel, the students return to the U.S. on August 21.

Students chosen to participate in the ADL Campus Editors Mission are all editors-in-chief or editorial department heads at their respective college newspapers and come from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. 

The students will be representing Amherst College, Bates College, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles Harbor College, Montana State University, Morehouse College, Oregon State University, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, University of California – Irvine, University of Cincinnati, University of North Dakota and the University of Utah.

Now in its 13th year, the ADL mission was designed to give American journalism students an opportunity to learn about the history of the Jewish people, the modern State of Israel, and to get a firsthand perspective on the newsmaking events in Palestinian-Israeli relations by traveling to religious and historic sites and meeting with decisionmakers on the frontlines of the conflict.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.