Israel’s chief rabbi meets Christian leaders to ease tensions
By LAURIE COPANS
AP Worldstream
Oct 26, 2004
An Israeli chief rabbi held an unprecedented meeting Tuesday with
Christian clergy in Jerusalem in an effort to ease tensions after
an Orthodox Jew spat at an Armenian bishop near a holy site in the
Old City.
Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who sat at the head of a table surrounded
by clerics with gold crosses, black robes and silver staffs, denounced
any attacks on religious clergy in Israel.
“As sons of Abraham, we are brothers,” Metzger said. “We denounce
any act that is meant to degrade religious people.”
The meeting was called after the Oct. 10 incident in which a Jewish
seminary student spit on an Armenian archbishop carrying a cross in
Jerusalem, sparking a fist fight that damaged the cleric’s medallion.
Many of the 14 church representatives at the meeting Tuesday complained
that the incident was just one of dozens of similar attacks every year.
“Unfortunately this incident was not an isolated incident,” Armenian
Bishop Aris Shirvanian said. “Quite frequently we suffer some kind
of indignity … at least once a week.”
Shirvanian said Israeli rabbis needed to do a better job of educating
their followers not to participate in such attacks.
Metzger promised to ask rabbis in the Old City to give sermons on
religious tolerance. An Interior Ministry official said Jerusalem
police understood the importance of cracking down on anti-Christian
behavior among Orthodox Jews.
Although officially relations between Jewish and Christian clergy
are good in Jerusalem, tensions sometimes escalate over what church
leaders say are a disregard by Israel for their interests.
In a sign of the seriousness of the spitting incident, Tuesday’s
meeting was the first time in years a chief rabbi had met with so
many Christian clergy, said Efrat Orbach, a spokeswoman for Metzger.
In a sign of their excitement over the meeting, many church
representatives took pictures throughout. The gathering was initiated
by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which was
founded by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who moved to Israel from Chicago
in 2001.