About the CIU

With more than 50 years of experience in interreligious affairs, CIU Executive Director Rabbi Jack Bemporad is a trusted resource for insight, analysis and positive action. He leads the CIU through policy leadership and its many educational programs:

Education. The CIU educates theologians, academics and laity about interfaith issues among Christians, Jews, and Muslims including sacred texts, Holocaust revisionism and the Middle East. Rabbi Bemporad also teaches seminarians and lay students about Judaism and interreligious cooperation at the St. Thomas Aquinas University (the Angelicum), a Vatican University in Rome.

Insight. The CIU analyzes major theological developments through articles, conferences and speeches at leading institutions, such as the United Nations, at national and international universities, and at temples, churches and mosques around the world.

Programs: The CIU hosts groundbreaking and innovative programs such as its “Law and Ethics in Judaism and Islam,” in which Jewish and Muslim scholars discussed the methodology they use to analyze religions texts. The CIU’s Imams to Auschwitz study tours brought leading Imams, first from the U.S. and later, from the developing world, to the concentration camps and participants of both trips created and signed public documents denouncing Holocaust denial as well as anti-Semitism.

Our Scriptural Resources for Peace^© discussion, in which the leaders in the Abrahamic faiths retranslate, analyze, and contextualize passages in their scriptures that have led to hatred and dehumanization of “the other,” was, and continues to be, conducted via Webinar due to Covid-19.