LEWISTON, Maine – Bates College senior Smadar Bakovic of Neve Illan, Israel, and anti-war activist Jerry Genesio of Bridgton have received the 2003 William Stringfellow Awards for Peace and Justice, awarded in honor of the lawyer and lay theologian, Bates Class of 1949, who was prominent in the American peace movement. Given by the Office of the Chaplain, the awards annually recognize the achievement of a Bates College student and a Maine citizenwho have dedicated their lives and work to the promotion of peace and justice.

Like Stringfellow himself, award winners are distinguished by their courageous and sustained commitment to redressing the root causes of violence and social injustice and to engaging and opposing "the powers and principalities of this world," as Stringfellow described them.

A six-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Jerry Genesio founded Veterans for Peace, Inc., a national nonprofit organization, in 1985. The organization, which holds a United Nations NGO status, is dedicated to educating the public about the human costs of war. Genesio led fact-finding missions to war zones throughout Central America during the 1980s. He participated in the 1993 evacuation of more than 100 war-wounded children from Mostar, Bosnia, and other regions of conflict in the Balkans, and helped to arrange medical and surgical care for them in hospitals throughout Western Europe and the United States, including Central Maine Medical Center and St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Lewiston.

Smadar Bakovic, a veteran of the Israeli army, knows the Middle East conflicts well. She believes mutual understanding is key to a resolution in the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. At Bates, Bakovic has shared her perspectives about peace through study, journalism and organizing public events on and off campus.

An English major, Bakovic has used her senior thesis (an exploration of Israeli-Arab poetry) as a platform to further uncover the ties between Israel and its Arab citizens. During summer 2002 she returned to the Israeli Arab coastal village of Arara to continue research for an independent study about Israeli-Arab relations. Bakovic wanted to learn how Israeli Arab villagers lived and to see what problems they faced. She looked at the village structures, economic and social, and focused on the educational system, hoping to draw comparisons between Jewish and Arab education in Israel. She went into "places where Jews do not go and talked with hardworking people who experience everyday life," Bakovic says — villagers who told her, "not a lot of people want to hear what we have to say."

The awards coincided with the delivery of the William Stringfellow Lecture in Peace and Justice, given by minister and author Bill Wylie-Kellerman, editor of the anthology "A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writing of William Stringfellow " (Eerdmans, 1999).