Jerusalem, Feb 8, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Violence against Christians in Jerusalem continues to make the news following an incident on Feb. 3 when Father Nikodemus Schnabel, the abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition, was attacked by two young Jewish nationalists.
The incident occurred near the Zion Gate on the border between the Armenian and Jewish quarters. A minor and an individual approximately 20 years old spat on the priest and verbally attacked him, shouting insults against Jesus.
The scene was captured live by German journalist Natalie Amiri, who was filming videos with Schnabel at the time of the assault.
“Normally, I am used to the fact that people spit on me — this is a very daily experience, especially at Mount Zion [where the Dormition Abbey is located],” Schnabel told CNA a few days after the incident. The abbey is located in a Jewish neighborhood with a significant presence of religious schools (yeshivas) and ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredi), who do not tolerate the presence of Christians.
The monks of the Dormition are often under attack. In late December, the inscription “Christian missionaries are worse than Hamas” appeared on the wall of the Orthodox cemetery in front of the abbey. Frequently, during the night, the monastery is targeted with stones.
“I have no hate,” Schnabel said. “I prayed for the two guys who harassed me as I always pray for the perpetrators. This is the DNA of my being as a Christian.”
The two perpetrators have been sentenced to house arrest.
The Benedictine said he wonders “what’s wrong with these people, that they cannot accept that Jerusalem is a multicultural, multireligious, multiethnic city, holy for all Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike? What are they taught in their yeshivot (religious schools), in their synagogues? I think there’s a lack of good religious education,” he said.
“I ask the Israeli government and religious leaders in Israel who are really aware of this phenomenon,” Schnabel said. “As a Christian, I’m very aware of the rising problem of antisemitism and I really ask that also in Israel it would be accepted and recognized that there’s a problem which is called Christian hate from the Jewish side.”
These attacks occur in other hot spots in the city such as the Armenian quarter and the Via Dolorosa, where the streets of Jewish and Christian neighborhoods intersect. The incidents happen more often than the public and the media know because it is not always possible to document them, and many clergy, religious people — but also foreigners and Christian faithful — are not as likely to report them.
Hana Bendcowsky is program director of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations (JCJCR), part of the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue. She has been working for over 20 years as an expert on Christian communities in Israel and Jewish-Christian relations in the Israeli context.
“The phenomenon of the harassment of Christians in the Holy Land is not something new,” Bendcowsky explained to CNA. “The history of Jewish-Christian relations used to be very complicated, very painful. And even if the state of Israel allows freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, these hard feelings are still there and at certain times resurface strongly.”
The Rossing Center has recently launched a monitoring program for these incidents, noting an increase in cases in the last couple of years. There are dozens of confirmed cases with evidence supporting them. The episodes range from harassment such as insults and spitting to outright acts of violence toward Church property, the desecration of cemeteries, and physical threats.
“The whole society’s getting more polarized in the last few years and the religious society is getting more polarized as well,” Bendcowsky told CNA. “These kinds of people entered the Parliament and the government and the impression is that now there is more legitimacy to these behaviors.”
Bendcowsky explained that the attackers “are usually men, mainly teenagers to late 20s. All of them come from a religious background: either from the ultra-Orthodox world or from an ultra-nationalist and religious movement, which is a more extreme version of the traditional national religious society.” Some attacks are conducted by a group known as the Hilltop Youth — an extremist religious-nationalist settler youth movement.
In recent months, the phenomenon of assaults against Christians has ramped up and been reported by national and international press. The peak occurred just before the outbreak of war and then disappeared from public attention. Over the last few months there have been fewer people in the Old City, fewer opportunities for encounters, and fewer individuals documenting incidents. The case of Father Schnabel has brought the issue back into focus.
“Education is the key,” Bendcowsky said, echoing Schnabel’s view on how to address it. “We need to go through an educational process in order to change the mentality. If the majority of people publicly condemn these actions, gradually an atmosphere of delegitimization can be created. Perhaps individuals will think twice before spitting or making offensive remarks. It is essential to promote the idea in the country that these are unacceptable behaviors.”
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….cant be possible…all we hear about is the love we’re to have for Israel and how much Israel is a free & peaceful country..
Once again shattering the image..
Just like the controlled narrative about Gaza.
The great majority of Israelis find that sort of bad behavior obnoxious also & it’s not just reserved for Christian clergy. I know Reform & less observant Jews who’ve been treated the same way or worse in ultra orthodox neighborhoods.
“all we hear about”?
Maybe in the USA. In Australia and it seems most other countries, pretty much all we hear about is that Hamas and the Arabs are innocents and Israel is basically worse than the Nazis.
As long as it’s one extreme or another, right? We MUST understand every conflict as a struggle between pure good and pure evil, not between one group of flawed, sinful men and another group of flawed, sinful men. Oh, and we must by no means ask for any, you know, REASONS why one side might be better than the other, since those might lead to the realization that the distinction is less sharp than we can express using crayons. It’s much better just to appeal to Genesis 12:3 without thinking too hard about the fact that everyone in the Middle East (and in Europe and in North Africa) has by now the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob coursing through his veins.
We don’t understand in the USA the level of fundamentalism exists in people of other faiths. We take religion as a hobby in the USA. In other countries it is mixed with culture and survival! This is poor manners and scandalous behavior!
Most Israelis consider it terrible manners also. It’s coming from a small splinter group and they exhibit the same sort of rudeness to fellow Israelis.
Consider the Westboro Baptists. Or some fundamentalist street preachers. Every faith community has had a splinter group that went off the rails.
No doubt. However, there does need to be a correction to the other extreme tendency, the one that calls someone of Jewish heritage who REJECTS the Messiah, PRECISELY FOR THAT REASON, the “elder brother in faith” of someone of Jewish heritage who ACCEPTS the Messiah. This is the same extreme that leads bigpulpit.com, which claims to be “Catholic News and Punditry”, to suggest its (mostly American) readers to “Provide a Shabbat for an Israeli Soldier”. Not an Easter dinner for an American soldier, mind you; American Catholic readers are asked to support a foreign military in the exercise of a non-Christian religion.
Christians in general and Catholics in particular need to learn that today’s state of Israel is not the Kingdom of David; it is a modern, secular state with its own thorny past, present, and future. It has a right to exist, and its people have a right to live in peace, but they are owed no more from the world than is Cambodia. Perhaps soon we will be asked to sponsor Buddhist festivals for Cambodian soldiers, though.
Not every Israeli soldier is Jewish but Israel holds a very special place for believers and God’s chosen people. Not perfect people, but chosen all the same.
1. True, not every Israeli soldier is Jewish. Most of those who keep the Sabbath are, though, so those are the ones bigpulpit.com was talking about.
2. You point out that not every Israeli soldier is Jewish, but then you want to pretend that “Israel” as it sits in the UN today is the Israel referred to in the Bible? Do you have any reason that would not also imply that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are actually witnesses for Jehovah? Sorry, but a grandiose name does not prove a grandiose reality.
3. EVERYONE with Middle Eastern, North African, or European ancestry is descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, just as everyone with European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne (but with greater confidence). That alone is not enough to determine who is “chosen” and who is “not chosen”.
4. There are huge problems not only with answering the question of who REALLY is a Jew (from God’s perspective, which is the only one that matters); it is also surely a mistake to try to associate the blessings OR the curses with any ethnicity or nationality. You dare not, I hope, sweep the Parable of the Wicked Vinedressers under the rug, nor the reference to the “Synagogue of Satan”.
More briefly: We should be able to condemn murder, especially the murder of civilians, even more especially the murder of civilan women and children, without having to make dubious claims that special blessings and curses from the Old Testament era apply to modern political groups. You know — the kind of blessings and curses that were used, not so long ago, in an attempt to justify slavery.
Maybe, if most Israelis disapprove, they should go the next step and disincentivise it, somehow. There is a Christian /Jewidh fellowship with these poor elderly Jewish women in Jerusalem or somewhere. Maybe it needs to be exposed persecution against Christians in lands where they are not relatively over-comfortable, first. We have that and all the gestures by Pope John Paul 2, Trump and Evangelicals towards them. Maybe their leaders need to meet this ecumenism half way or be disregarded. Maybe we could stop having their back. Christian’s were hunted by Jews, like pre-Christian Saul, first, so I think we can bury the axe. Just sayin’.
“How blessed are you whenever people hate you, avoid you, insult you, and slander you because of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because your reward in heaven is great! That’s the way their ancestors used to treat the prophets”. – Luke 6:22
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Can’t help but wonder what Allenby would have thought of the result of his entrance into Jerusalem in 1917. The promise of three religions in coexistence is unfulfilled and little prospect that it ever will be.