New York, NY, August 15, 2006 … A group of campus newspaper editors from the United States is on the ground in Israel witnessing the immediate impact of the current cease-fire with Hezbollah as part of a program designed to give college journalists an up-close look at the issues surrounding the region.

The participants in the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) 2006 Campus Editors Mission will tour Israel extensively and engage in a series of briefings with a broad spectrum of voices from Israeli and Arab perspectives. The students are meeting 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 ten American students arrived in Israel on August 14, the day the cease-fire between the Israeli Army and Hezbollah began.

“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,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The students will also have a unique opportunity to witness Israel at a very important time in history.”

The mission first went to Poland, where the students visited the concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek and the areas once occupied by the Warsaw and Krakow ghettoes. They learned 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 will return to the U.S. on August 20.

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 Farleigh Dickinson University, George Washington University, Baylor University, University of Central Florida, University of North Dakota, Georgetown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University, Cal State Dominguez Hills, University of Utah.

Now in its 14th 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 news-making events in Arab-Israeli relations by traveling to religious and historic sites and meeting with decision-makers on the frontlines of the conflict.

The Anti-Defamation League’s 2006 Campus Editors Mission to Poland and Israel is funded by Vivian and Edward Merrin, Laurie Tisch and the Laurie M. Tisch Foundation, and Bidi Finkelstein, in memory of her late husband Albert.