Rabbi Na’ama Dafni and Rev. Yousef Yacoub in Haifa, Israel.
Jerome Socolovsky/NPR
conceal caption
toggle caption
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 nearly looks like each considered one 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 is a great honor and privilege to be with you today, to kindle lights of hope, happiness, and with prayers for peaceful holidays, years of quiet and good neighborliness, that we may raise our boys and girls with safety and love,” she tells the group.
Yacoub invited the rabbi to affix him on the Christmas celebration, he says, to point out “that we are praying, both of us, for light and for peace and for happiness for people.”
Regardless of strained relations between the Vatican and Israel in the course of the struggle 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, try to construct belief between their communities, which stay largely siloed from one another.
It is a part of an effort to forge interreligious understanding in an historic port metropolis with a really numerous panorama: Along with its majority-Jewish inhabitants, there are a lot of Christians right here, together with different Catholic denominations such because the Melkite Greek church, and vital communities of Muslims, Druze and Bahá’ís.
St. Louis the King Cathedral in Haifa, Israel.
Jerome Socolovsky/NPR
conceal caption
toggle caption
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 below a succession of rulers within the Center East, each Christian and Islamic.
“There was violence, there was hatred and there were 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 usually take into consideration Christians within the context of European antisemitism, equivalent 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 should not even concentrate on them.
“You might even find people who have no idea what happened in Spain,” he says.
This 12 months 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 “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” It additionally rejected a deeply ingrained Catholic notion of Jews as “rejected or accursed by God.”
“The document speaks more to the Christian communities where the Jewish people are minorities,” Yacoub says, calling it “a tremendous shift” for Christians in in Europe, however of much less significance within the Center East. “For communities that lived in interreligious diversity, Nostra Aetate is a helper, but for something that was already there.”
Na’ama Dafni, the rabbi who lit the candle with the priest, would not agree fully. She factors out that many Israeli Jews, together with her personal forebears, have European ancestry.
“The lived experience of my family is the Holocaust, is the anti-Jewish sentiment of the Christian population in Europe. So, for Abouna Yousef Yacoub,” she says, calling the priest by his Arabic honorific, “that’s not part of his story, because he was here. But for my family, it is part of my story. Although my grandparents helped build this country.”
The rabbi and priest are good associates 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 spiritual leaders, says Uriel Simonsohn, a professor of early medieval Islamic historical past and cofounder of the Haifa laboratory and the Frieze Heart for Shared Society. The conferences had been held in secret due to the robust views across the Israel-Palestinian battle and sensitivities some spiritual leaders felt round collaborating with these of different faiths.
Many had been involved that preventing 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 preventing in Gaza.
He recollects the rationale for bringing the leaders collectively: “You are religious leaders. Let’s keep our city safe.”
The town has remained largely peaceable for the reason that struggle began, partly due to efforts like this, amongst different causes.
The Haifa Spiritual Research Laboratory now affords a graduate course in interfaith dialogue, with 12 college students within the present cohort. In a single seminar, the scholars appear like a mini-parliament of religions. There’s an imam with a skullcap, a number of Druze girls sporting white headscarves, some Jews and a Catholic priest in a cassock.
Rev. Munier Mazzawi is without doubt one of 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 nearly no Jews, he appreciates the prospect to dive into the expertise of Israel’s majority spiritual group.
“I’m interested in learning more about the Jews, including [their history] in Europe with antisemitism and everything,” he says. Though he speaks fluent Hebrew, he says he knew little about antisemitism in Europe or concerning the discrimination Jews traditionally confronted in Arab international locations.
Karen Levisohn teaches a category in this system on spiritual 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 suppose a lot about that till she left her job as a high-tech engineer to turn into a tour information.
“And I was amazed to realize what goes around my house,” she says, referring to websites within the Galilee close to the place she grew up, “and the beauty that you would see in Christianity that I was not aware, because what we learn in school is about the Crusaders and the Holocaust and things like that.”
That is the context, she says, during which the phrases of the late Pope Francis had been obtained by Israelis when he known as for an investigation final 12 months into whether or not Israel’s navy actions in Gaza constituted genocide. (His successor, Pope Leo XIV, has to date averted calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide however voiced deep issues concerning the scenario).
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 massacre” 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 don’t even need 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.”
