Catholics and Jews in Israel work to spice up interfaith understanding : NPR

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Jerome Socolovsky/NPR HAIFA, Israel — St. Louis the King Cathedral is festooned with string lights for the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. The multitude pressed between the alabaster-like partitions of the churchyard is so dense, it virtually seems like each one in every of Haifa's estimated 4,000 Maronite Catholics is right here.

Earlier than the lighting ceremony and the fireworks, the Rev. Yousef Yacoub invitations a rabbi onstage. Yacoub stands beside Na'ama Dafni of Or Hadash, a Reform congregation, as she lights a blue-and-white braided candle and says a nondenominational prayer.

"It's a nice honor and privilege to be with you immediately, to kindle lights of hope, happiness, and with prayers for peaceable holidays, years of quiet and good neighborliness, that we might elevate our girls and boys with security and love," she tells the gang.

Yacoub invited the rabbi to hitch him on the Christmas celebration, he says, to indicate "that we're praying, each of us, for mild and for peace and for happiness for individuals."

Regardless of strained relations between the Vatican and Israel in the course of the conflict in Gaza — with the late Pope Francis suggesting Israel might have dedicated genocide, one thing Israel vehemently denies — Catholic and Jewish leaders in Haifa, a metropolis alongside the Mediterranean Sea in northern Israel, are attempting to construct belief between their communities, which dwell largely siloed from one another.

It is a part of an effort to forge interreligious understanding in an historical port metropolis with a really numerous panorama: Along with its majority-Jewish inhabitants, there are numerous Christians right here, together with different Catholic denominations such because the Melkite Greek church, and important communities of Muslims, Druze and Bahá'ís.

<img src="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4284x4284+0+0/resize/1100/quality/50/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fbd%2F74%2F1833a84c4b5ea50e94d7768dca0a%2Fimg-0062-1.jpg" data-template="https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/4284x4284+0+0/resize/{width}/quality/{quality}/format/{format}/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fbd%2F74%2F1833a84c4b5ea50e94d7768dca0a%2Fimg-0062-1.jpg" class="img" alt="Cathedral of St. Louis the King in Haifa, Israel." loading="lazy"/> St. Louis the King Cathedral in Haifa, Israel. Jerome Socolovsky/NPR cover caption

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Jerome Socolovsky/NPR Many have histories of persecution and struggling. For Maronites, the persecution goes again greater than one-and-a-half millennia and occurred beneath a succession of rulers within the Center East, each Christian and Islamic.

"There was violence, there was hatred and there have been wars," says Yacoub.

When this church was constructed within the late nineteenth century, it had French safety, as a result of the Ottoman Empire restricted the founding of latest church buildings for native populations, he says. That is why it was named after the thirteenth century French crusader and saint, King Louis IX.

The Maronite priest says Jews he meets right here typically take into consideration Christians within the context of European antisemitism, akin to Spain's expulsion of their ancestors in 1492. He tells them Christians within the Center East have little or nothing to do with worst horrors of European historical past, and will not even pay attention to them.

"You may even discover individuals who don't know what occurred in Spain," he says.

This yr is the sixtieth anniversary of a landmark Vatican declaration that renounced centuries of antisemitic theology and open the door for Catholics to domesticate relations with the world's different main religions. Nostra Aetate, proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on Oct. 28, 1965, declared that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ "can't be charged towards all of the Jews, with out distinction, then alive, nor towards the Jews of immediately." It additionally rejected a deeply ingrained Catholic notion of Jews as "rejected or accursed by God."

"The doc speaks extra to the Christian communities the place the Jewish individuals are minorities," Yacoub says, calling it "an amazing shift" for Christians in in Europe, however of much less significance within the Center East. "For communities that lived in interreligious range, Nostra Aetate is a helper, however for one thing that was already there."

Na'ama Dafni, the rabbi who lit the candle with the priest, would not agree utterly. She factors out that many Israeli Jews, together with her personal forebears, have European ancestry.

"The lived expertise of my household is the Holocaust, is the anti-Jewish sentiment of the Christian inhabitants in Europe. So, for Abouna Yousef Yacoub," she says, calling the priest by his Arabic honorific, "that is not a part of his story, as a result of he was right here. However for my household, it's a part of my story. Though my grandparents helped construct this nation."

The rabbi and priest are good buddies and belong to an interfaith discussion board at Haifa College's Laboratory for Spiritual Research. Shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, the discussion board introduced collectively 20 non secular leaders, says Uriel Simonsohn, a professor of early medieval Islamic historical past and cofounder of the Haifa laboratory and the Frieze Middle for Shared Society. The conferences have been held in secret due to the robust views across the Israel-Palestinian battle and sensitivities some non secular leaders felt round collaborating with these of different faiths.

Many have been involved that combating between the Israeli navy and Hamas may spark a repeat of the intercommunal violence between Arabs and Jews that erupted in Haifa and elsewhere in Israel two years earlier, he says, triggered by a earlier outbreak of combating in Gaza.

He remembers the rationale for bringing the leaders collectively: "You might be non secular leaders. Let's hold our metropolis secure."

The town has remained largely peaceable for the reason that conflict began, partly due to efforts like this, amongst different causes.

The Haifa Spiritual Research Laboratory now provides a graduate course in interfaith dialogue, with 12 college students within the present cohort. In a single seminar, the scholars seem like a mini-parliament of religions. There's an imam with a skullcap, a number of Druze ladies sporting white headscarves, some Jews and a Catholic priest in a cassock.

Rev. Munier Mazzawi is among the college students taking the course. He heads the Greek Catholic Church within the city of Maghar, about 50 miles from Haifa in northern Israel. Though the city is majority-Druze, with just about no Jews, he appreciates the possibility to dive into the expertise of Israel's majority non secular group.

"I am interested by studying extra in regards to the Jews, together with [their history] in Europe with antisemitism and the whole lot," he says. Though he speaks fluent Hebrew, he says he knew little about antisemitism in Europe or in regards to the discrimination Jews traditionally confronted in Arab nations.

Karen Levisohn teaches a category in this system on non secular tourism and is writing her doctoral thesis on Christian tourism in Israel.

A secular Jew, she grew up within the Galilee, the place Jesus spent a lot of his life. However she did not assume a lot about that till she left her job as a high-tech engineer to change into a tour information.

"And I used to be amazed to understand what goes round my home," she says, referring to websites within the Galilee close to the place she grew up, "and the sweetness that you'd see in Christianity that I used to be not conscious, as a result of what we study in class is in regards to the Crusaders and the Holocaust and issues like that."

That is the context, she says, wherein the phrases of the late Pope Francis have been obtained by Israelis when he known as for an investigation final yr into whether or not Israel's navy actions in Gaza constituted genocide. (His successor, Pope Leo XIV, has to this point prevented calling Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide however voiced deep issues in regards to the state of affairs).

Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, Yaron Sideman, responded that Israel was exercising its proper to self-defense following what he known as the "genocidal bloodbath" that Hamas carried out on Oct. 7, 2023. It was simply one of many controversies that erupted throughout Francis' papacy, regardless of early indicators that his papacy can be a time of elevated Catholic-Jewish cooperation.

"The relations between Jews and Christians [are] so delicate you do not even want a match" to ignite a firestorm of controversy, Levisohn says.

However in a land rife with recollections of persecution and battle, there is a glimmer of hope when a rabbi joins a priest at a vacation celebration — as occurred at Haifa's Maronite St. Louis the King Cathedral — and lights a candle whereas the priest declares: "Blessed be the peacemakers."