c. 2006 Religion News Service
HAIFA, Israel _ There is no bomb shelter in the century-old stone building where Raida Biady lives, so when the air-raid sirens begin their menacing drone, she and her children run to the apartment’s foyer, the only place without windows.
As she has done a hundred times since the war between Israel and Lebanon erupted a month ago, Biady, a 39-year-old Muslim community activist, tries to soothe her 7-year-old daughter, Ayan, who clings to her mother’s waist, her huge brown eyes wide with fear.
Biady’s 13-year-old son, Ayal, and 16-year-old daughter, Rinal, stare at the floor and bite their lips, trying to appear grown-up and unafraid.
“I pray to God to protect my family, and then I pray for this war to end,” Biady says a few minutes later, after a second siren has sounded. A few hours later, a Hezbollah rocket strikes an apartment building up the road, killing three. “Sometimes I ask God why this is happening, but my faith hasn’t been shaken.”
But the war is taking its toll in other ways, Biady admits.
“We haven’t been to the mosque since the war broke out because it’s a 15-minute walk and it’s too dangerous,” she says, suddenly wistful. “The mosque is the center of our lives, and I miss the calm I feel when praying with the community.”
The war, which is wreaking havoc and destroying lives in northern Israel and much of Lebanon, is also having a profound effect on the religious life of Israelis of all faiths.
Regardless of their religious beliefs _ Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Druze, Circassian and Bahai _ northern residents say the risk of Hezbollah’s rocket attacks has made it difficult for them to attend religious services and other activities once centered around their church, mosque, synagogue or shrine.
Bar mitzvahs, circumcisions and baptisms are taking place in bomb shelters, or are being held out of Katyusha range. As war rages, religious practice has gone underground _ sometimes literally.
“We have ordered our faithful not to convene in large crowds,” says Archbishop Elias Chacour, leader of the 78,000-strong Melkite Catholic Church in Israel. “Couples are postponing their weddings.”
Despite the fact that some 3,000 Hezbollah rockets have landed in the north, “we are trying to hold church services,” Chacour says. It hasn’t been easy.
During a recent Sunday Mass at a cathedral in Haifa, “I brought two priests but no one came, no one at all,” Chacour says. “The siren kept blaring and no one could leave their homes.”
To fill the spiritual void, Chacour spends his days _ and often nights _ driving from one Christian community to another, “dancing between the missiles,” he says with a smile. “I go to pray with them and give them some encouragement.”
Israel’s Civil Command has prohibited people from congregating in public places out of concerns for their safety, creating “serious dilemmas,” says Rabbi Mauricio Balter, who leads a Conservative synagogue in Kiryat Bialik, a Haifa suburb that has been pummeled by rockets.
Because so many rituals central to Jewish life _ daily and Sabbath prayers, circumcisions, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and the recitation of the Kaddish memorial prayer for the dead _ require the presence of 10 adults, “people are forced to make choices,” Balter says.
“One of my colleagues in Haifa told me how the sirens went off during a funeral. Do you bury the dead quickly, as we are commanded, or risk the lives of the living?”
On a recent Friday night, Balter says, “Forty people came for Shabbat-eve services in the shelter, even though it is forbidden to be in the streets.”
No matter their religion, Balter says the people he meets at municipal bomb shelters _ stiflingly hot, deafeningly loud and miserably crowded places _ are searching for spiritual solace.
“The next day, Shabbat morning,” he continued, “four rockets fell nearby at 8:20. I was certain no one would come to synagogue, but we succeeded in getting a minyan (quorum). Things like this reinforce my faith.”
Despite the ongoing trauma _ or perhaps because of it _ rank-and-file citizens have clung to their faith, religious leaders say, as the bombs rain down around them.
“Every day we begin a fast that lasts from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and pray for the situation to end,” says the Rev. Bilal Hibiby, the pastor of St. Savior’s Anglican Church in Kfar Yasif, just outside heavily hit Acre.
“We congregate in the church every night at 9 p.m., to pray for peace for all the victims: Christian, Muslim and Jewish.”
Unlike some of the hardest-hit northern population centers, which have been decimated by the exodus of traumatized families to the south, Hibiby’s 320-member community has remained more or less intact.
“We have not been directly hit by a rocket, praise God, and we prefer to stay with each other, like a family,” Hibiby says. “We have a saying in Arabic: `If you go to heaven and there are no people there, it’s not worth it.”’
In some cases, the violence and uncertainty have actually reinforced and enhanced people’s faith.
Ori Wohl, 13, says the circumstances of his recent (July 29) bar mitzvah at the bomb shelter next to Balter’s synagogue added an unexpected dimension to his passage into Jewish manhood.
“At first, I wanted to go ahead with the bar mitzvah because I had studied my Torah portion for three months,” Ori says in his home in nearby Kiryat Motzkin. Then he realized his ceremony fell close to Tisha B’Av, a mournful day on which Jews recall the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem.
“It made me sad to think that, 2,000 years later, there are people who are still trying to destroy the Jewish people,” Ori says. Only 25 people managed to squeeze into the bomb shelter for Ori’s bar mitzvah.
Outside their home, air-raid sirens begin to blare. Ori, his 10-year-old sister, Roni, and their mother, Smadar, hurry into the reinforced concrete “safe room” of their house. Beyond the window, protected by a hinged concrete slab, the family can hear two muted thuds. Two Katyushas have landed several blocks away.
“We are not leading a normal life,” Smadar Wohl says of the situation that has forced her family into a home bomb shelter. “Sixty years ago, children in the Holocaust had to have their bar mitzvahs in cellars.”
Though she doesn’t liken the current war to the horrors of the Holocaust, Ori’s mother can’t shake off the feeling that some things never change.
“We’re part of Jewish history,” she says, gazing at her son. “Ori’s bar mitzvah was a link in the chain of the Jewish people.”
KRE/PH END CHABIN
Editors: To obtain photos of Raida Biady and her children, and Smadar Wohl and her children, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
