On Holy Ground at MET Theatre

The new show "On Holy Ground" brings the Israeli-Palestine conflict into sharp focus from the wildly different perspectives of three women. In Act One, Salome Jens portrays Henrietta Szold (1860-1945). Szold, a co-founder of Hadassah, founded the first Jewish hospital in Palestine, then under Turkish rule and later under British Mandate. Szold established social services accessible to both Jews and Arabs and proposed a bi-national (Jewish and Arab) state in Palestine, a dream she did not live to see fulfilled. She helped run Youth Aliyah, an organization that rescued 30,000 Jewish children from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. In Act Two, Lisa Richards portrays Shula, an Orthodox Jewish woman from the settlement of Efrat who has lost her teenage daughter, slain in a bombing by a Jihadist. Separated by a fence, she meets with Reim, the Palestinian mother of the bomber, portrayed by Abbe' Rowlins.