c. 1998 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM _ Candles lit the darkness of the Syrian Orthodox Convent of St. Mark, built in 70 A.D., as roughly 200 worshippers packing the pews, crowding the aisle and cramming the altar as they prayed in the rhythmic Aramaic language of the first Christians.
Metropolitan Mar Sewerios Malki Murad, patriarch of Jerusalem, Jordan and the Holy Lands, chanted a mournful reading from a 500-year-old Bible, asking God to forgive the sins of his people.
The metropolitan, having donned multicolored, embroidered vestments and taken up a gold cross adorned with two cobra heads, prayed that the curtain hiding the altar would open, a symbol of God’s forgiveness and an indication that parishioners could begin Holy Week anew.
The curtain opened _ with the aid of a deacon pulling a cord _ just as it has in similar ceremonies for nearly 2,000 years, but for the parishioners the future remains cloaked in uncertainty. The Christians who live and work in the place where Jesus began his teachings are increasingly isolated in a land of warring Jews and Arabs.
At this crowded Sunday service, roughly one-quarter of the congregants came from the United States, pilgrims led by Archbishop Cyril Aprhen Karim, who from his church in Teaneck, N.J., oversees the faithful along the East Coast of the United States.
“I think there will always be Christians here, but only a small minority,” Karim said. “The future of the Holy Land Syrian Orthodox, I believe, may be looking after empty churches and monasteries.”
Not everyone is so pessimistic, but Christians in the 15 denominations recognized by Israel, most of them Arabs who face the same kind of day-to-day problems Palestinian Muslims suffer, agree they are in crisis.
Christians, who accounted for roughly 10 percent of the population when Israel declared its independence 50 years ago, now represent just 2 percent of the 5.7 million Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
While some of this dilution can be explained by massive Jewish immigration and higher Muslim birth rates, experts said there also is great incentive for Christians to leave.
Besieged by wars, unemployment and the unstable peace between Arabs and Jews, increasing numbers of young people have decided to leave the land their families inhabited for centuries.
“This trend started before World War I, and it’s only gotten worse,” said Jane Handal, a Catholic who lives in Bethlehem, not far from the Church of the Nativity built on the site where tradition says Jesus was born. “The economy makes it very difficult, and the inappropriate peace process is worsening things.”
Handal, an architect and planner who works in the development office of the Palestinian Authority, said unemployment stands at roughly 50 percent in her city.
“Many of my friends have gone,” she said. “All the younger generation wants to leave. Anybody who studies abroad stays where they are and tries to find work. Opportunities are rare here.”
Still, after earning a master’s degree last year in England, Handal came home to live with her parents, who trace their roots in the Holy Land back generations by way of Yemen.
Handal and other young professionals working in Bethlehem say they stay because they want to improve conditions in their country. They also talk of a special responsibility of maintaining the Christian presence in the land where Jesus once walked.
“People have been predicting for some time that Christianity in the Middle East would disappear from the scene,” said Harry Hagopian, executive director of the Middle East Council of Churches in Jerusalem. “It has not happened in two millenniums. You have to remember, it is not the quantity but the quality of witness that matters. The Christian story began with one man and 12 disciples.”
It was long after Jesus’ death, after his disciples began to spread his words to Rome and beyond, that Christianity became a mass movement. In the Holy Land, where various religions competed over the centuries, its followers were always small in numbers, their ranks replenished from time to time by Crusaders or pilgrims.
Part of the problem today is that the estimated 170,000 Christians living in the Holy Land are divided into so many denominations. They are Roman Catholics and Armenians, Syrian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox, Ethiopians and Uniates not to mention various Protestant groups.
They occasionally struggle over ceremonial rights in some of Christianity’s holiest sites. Still, as keepers of those sites and with representatives from around the world running liaison offices, schools and social service agencies, they often have influence beyond their numbers.
In the newly formed governing council of the Palestinian Authority, for example, they hold 7 percent of the 88 seats.
Still, Hagopian and other “living stones,” as Arab Christians are often called, say they often feel forgotten by Western Christians, who seem eager to claim the historic landmarks of the Holy Land but not so quick to embrace its people.
“Unfortunately, pilgrims come and go. They visit the churches, visit the stones, but not the living church,” said Claudette Habesch, secretary general of Caritas Jerusalem, the Catholic charities office in the Holy Land. “Many pilgrims come and go without ever realizing there are Christians living in the Holy Land.”
Experts said the reasons are complex. Part of it has to do with deep guilt over the Holocaust that discourages Christians from criticizing Israel, a sense that centuries of Christian anti-Semitism laid the groundwork for the Nazi campaign. There also is a clear identification of most Arabs as Muslims, whose relationship with Christians has been strained since the Crusades of the Middle Ages.
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Still, some American Christians argue they have not forgotten Arab Christians and are doing their best to lobby on their behalf.
“While it is true that Christians in the Middle East remain somehow invisible to many people in the West, I would argue there is a lot of genuine concern, not only for the Christians but all the people caught up in the complicated and conflicted situation there,” said David Weaver, a Middle East adviser to the National Council of Churches in New York.
Pilgrim devotion to holy sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre hasn’t translated into a tourist boon for places like Bethlehem, just minutes by car from more-expensive Jerusalem but a jarring trip for Americans unaccustomed to security checkpoints.
In Bethlehem, only 10 percent of the hotel rooms were full at Easter, and officials are concerned things might not improve during celebrations for the millennium. Israeli authorities, meanwhile, are planning tent cities for crowds of pilgrims and publicly chastising Christian churches for failing to properly prepare.
“Whenever anything happens with the peace process, all visits stop,” said Handal, who is a member of the Bethlehem committee trying to make millennial preparations. “They are predicting millions will visit for the millennium, but I have my doubts.”
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In such difficult times, Christians from so many denominations have tried to put their differences behind them. Once fistfights would break out in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over prime positions during holiday services. Today, negotiation and compromise are the watchwords.
Still, many Christians grumble that leaders have failed to take sufficient steps to ensure their people can find jobs, housing and education.
Squeezed by a poor economy and increasing fundamentalism by both Jews and Muslims, Christians said it is sometimes better to look for a fresh start elsewhere.
“This is a church of love, so when you see dictatorship, war and bloodshed, it goes against your beliefs,” said Jack Khazmo, a Syrian Orthodox who edits a pro-Palestinian political magazine, Al Bayader Assiyasi.
Orthodox Jews argue Muslims are the ones persecuting Christians, and Khazmo agreed there have been isolated incidents of abuse. But he and others said the relationship is much better between Arab Christians and Arab Muslims than it is between Arab Christians and Israeli Jews.
“Do I have to wear a veil? Do Muslims stone me when I go to church?” Habesch asked angrily. “What seeds of division are they trying to plant? I and the Muslims, we are one people. We are Palestinians, and whether we are Christians or Muslims is a private matter.”
Habesch, whose family has been in Jerusalem and its surrounding area for generations, said it is the occupation of Palestinian land by Jews that has caused Arab Christians the most pain. She said she lost her family home during the 1967 war, a home just a few minutes from her office outside the New Gate into the Old City.
“I can forgive, and I will, but I can’t forget,” she said. “Still, I don’t want to become a prisoner of the past.”
To that end, Habesch said, her work with Caritas involves everything from low-interest loans to young couples struggling to remain in the Holy Land to college scholarships and programs for the elderly.
All three of her children attended universities in the United States, and when her eldest son graduated, he initially took a job as a credit analyst in a New York bank.
Eventually, she wrote to ask him his intentions, concerned that all three children would make new homes in America. She was unwilling to demand they return, however, given the difficult economic and political conditions at home.
“He wrote back to say, `From the start, I had one obligation, and that was to gain the most education possible so that I can come back and be an active member of my community.”’
Today, her son is the general manager of a bank in Ramallah, a Palestinian-controlled city in the West Bank, and his two siblings have returned as well.
“It is important for us never to forget that we are Christians living in the Holy Land,” said Bernard Sabella, a professor of sociology at Bethlehem University, who has studied Christian emigration trends. “This is something very special. What better witness could there be than to be in Palestine and working for peace?”
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