Dalai Lama to visit Newark on Friday

Source Credit: The StarLedger

NEWARK — It is a curious time to talk about peace.

With celebrations of an international terrorist’s death subsiding, in a country fighting two wars, and in a city with a rising murder rate, the Dalai Lama will visit Newark on Friday. He will bring a massive coterie and headline a three-day summit that will advocate for nonviolence in everything from national debate to kitchen table conversations.

Over three days, gangbangers-turned-mentors, celebrities and scholars will bring a message of peace to a city that has too little of it.

The summit has been two years in the making. It is the brainchild of two men — a Jersey-born millionaire and a renowned Tibetan scholar. From a conversation between them, the Newark Peace Education Summit has grown into an event expected to draw thousands and, organizers hope, have a lasting effect.

"On the same panel you’ll have Nobel laureates with an anti-violence street kid talking about their collective experience and sharing it," said Drew Katz, a philanthropist and Cherry Hill native who conceived the summit two years ago after meeting Robert Thurman, the first American ordained a Buddhist monk.

"We’re in a very dangerous time in America as a whole," said Thurman, president of the Tibet House U.S. "This conference is sort of going against a trend that somehow violence will solve all of our problems."

With the Dalai Lama, Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams will lead conversations on nonviolent conflict resolution between nations and between next-door neighbors. Dozens of panels will cover subjects such as neural synapses, conversational skills and ending homelessness.

Students throughout the city have been painting sections of what will become a 50-foot by 30-foot mural that will greet the Dalai Lama.

Rutgers University will help carry out lessons from the weekend with a permanent program, the International Institute for Peace, which will conduct research and train future leaders in nonviolent conflict resolution.

The Newark Museum will put its world-renowned Tibetan collection on full display.

Yet while peace will be on the lips of many this weekend, the city continues to grapple with increasing desperation and violence. Unemployment soared to 15.9 percent earlier this year. Crime in this year’s first quarter was up 21 percent compared with last year, and each weekend brings a new spate of shootings.

"I’d love to tell you that the peace conference was going to solve all of Newark’s violence problems. It’s not," Katz said. He added, if Newark youth "are exposed to the conference, maybe they think twice. Maybe that has a positive effect. Maybe that saves somebody’s life."

More than 3,000 people — 1,000 of them children — are expected to visit the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the summit’s primary venue, between Friday and Sunday, organizers said.

The event’s 106 speakers range from actors Edward Norton and Goldie Hawn to activists Earl "Street Doctor" Best and Dashaun "Jiwe" Morris.

Jiwe said he will discuss the same message he has brought to Newark’s neighborhoods for years. A Bloods gang member who has renounced violence, Jiwe’s mission is to show Newark teenagers that they have something in their lives to cherish.

"A lot of them don’t care, a lot of them don’t feel and a lot of them don’t want," Jiwe said. "Sitting in Newark all day on your block, seeing drugs and violence and liquor stores, you don’t see a lot of hope."

He said his goal is to show that there is hope.

"Getting them lined up with things that they care about — value — that make them want to get up in the damn morning," Jiwe, 30, said. "Some knucklehead is running his mouth and I think, ‘I could knock this guy out clean, cold,’ but I’m thinking that I have my daughters to get home to."

Thurman said the Dalai Lama and the people of Tibet provide a similar example, though it is one that has been borne out over centuries.

"They were really tough and feared by their neighbors," he said of Tibet during the 7th century. "They made a choice to have a better quality of life internally. They have an ability to extend an example."