During the week covered by this review, we received 12 articles on the following subjects:
Anti-Missionary Activity
Political Issues
Interfaith Dialogue
The Pope and the Vatican
Status of Holy Sites
Film
Archaeology
Anti-Missionary Activity
Kol Ha’Ir Bnei Brak, October 28; Sha’a Tova, October 29, 2015
The anti-missionary activist organization Yad L’Achim reports many recent calls regarding missionaries using the recent unrest as an opportunity to preach Christianity. In response, Yad L’Achim has begun a campaign to raise the awareness of the public concerning this issue, and has renewed their requests to orthodox members of the Knesset “to do all in their power to pass the anti-missionizing law.”
Political Issues
Sha’a Tova, October 22, 2015
This six-page article begins by analyzing American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent pronouncements that “the real problem in the Middle East is that the Arabs are not willing to accept the Jews as a people with rights, and all the rest is propaganda.” This is contrary to the accepted opinion that Israeli settlements are the core of the problem. The article continues to quote Goldberg, who says that “the belief of many Palestinian leaders that the Jews have invented a connection to the Temple Mount” is “a challenge to Islamic history,” as “Islamic writings recognize a Jewish Temple Mount themselves.” He speaks of the “strength of the Palestinian narrative,” which “rejects any solution based upon national and religious equality for Jews.” Goldberg quotes Professor Shlomo Avineri, writing for Haaretz, as saying that “many Palestinians see the conflict, not as being between two national movements, but rather between one national movement (Palestinian) and a colonial entity (Israeli),” which, “like all other colonial entities, is destined to die.”
The second part of the article analyzes the opinion of Professor Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi from Italy, who has stated recently that “the concept ‘Palestinian people’ does not exist” and that it is a mere “political manipulation.” He too is of the opinion that the root of the problem is in the fact that the Arabs “do not recognize the Jews’ right over the country.” He has stated that denying that either the first or second temples existed is “rewriting Islamic history,” since “the Koran explicitly states that the mosques [on the Temple Mount] were built on the place where the Jewish prophets prayed in the temple.”
Interfaith Dialogue
The Jerusalem Post, October 26, 2015
The Polish Episcopate, the “local branch of the church,” has recently made a statement declaring anti-Semitism to be a sin, according to Radio Poland. Issued in a pastoral letter, the statement specifically declared that “anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are sins against the love of thy neighbor” and that “Christian-Jewish dialogue must never be treated as ‘the religious hobby.’” Moreover, the letter also admitted that Polish Christians were sometimes indifferent to Nazi deeds in Poland during World War II, and said that “if Christians and Jews had practiced religious brotherhood in the past, more Jews would have found help and support from Christians” during that time.
Rabbi Michael Shudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, welcomed this move warmly. “The statement of the Polish Episcopate condemning anti-Semitism as a sin is a clear and important declaration of moral and historical value, not only for Poland but for Europe and beyond,” Shudrich stated to The Jerusalem Post.
The Pope and the Vatican
The Jerusalem Post, October 26, 2015
This article states the opinion that Pope Francis is “in favor of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without their first marriage being declared null,” and explores one possible avenue the pope may be using to reach a doctrinal change in this matter, although theoretically he has no power to enforce such a change.
This course of action consists in part of determining membership in and attempting to influence the statements of the synods, “which have no official doctrinal role but which can project an image of ecclesiastical consensus.” Although the outcome of this is uncertain, it is clear that no majority whatever has as yet been reached on this issue.
The Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2015
This article is a survey of the background to and context of the groundbreaking Nostra Aetate document (specifically the Jewish chapter), asking, “What was before it?,” “What was around it?,” and, “What was after it?” (October 28, 2015, was the 50-year anniversary of Nostra Aetate.)
The article states that the centuries preceding Nostra Aetate consisted of “antagonism to outsiders,” especially Jews, and that other faiths were, by definition, invalid. “Religious tolerance was consistently rejected” and papal infallibility was established in 1896. However, by Pope John XXIII’s time, “conversation with the modern world” was seen to be necessary. Although the wording of the document, particularly as regards the lack of condemnation of anti-Semitism, caused some conflict—the final result was seen both as “going too far” and as “not going far enough”—the result was to “remove what has been called the ‘mentality of opposition between Jew and Christian.’” The strength of the document is in the way it sees Judaism and Christianity as linked, its view that “human diversity is part of the Divine plan,” the way “it makes it heretical to be an anti-Semite and/or to demonize the Jewish people,” and “its iteration that the human community is one.”
Fifty years later, both the results of Nostra Aetate and the work yet to be done are obvious, “but we are embarked upon the path. … Nostra Aetate changed the Church from what I have heard described (none too delicately) as a predatory bully to a world faith ready to discourse with other world faiths. The Jewish chapter moved the Church from a mentality of hostility to a sibling convinced that Catholics and Jews are both partners in the mystery of God’s plan.”
Status of Holy Sites
Haaretz, October 27, 2015
Citing examples of Jewish and Muslim figures’ nationalism “trumping their faith” with regard to the Temple Mount, as well as that of a Christian Arab journalist ignoring the New Testament in his zeal to deny that a Jewish temple ever existed, this article asserts that the only solution is “to give jurisdiction of holy sites to objective secularists, since only they can preserve the holiness attributed to these sites, preserve the holiness of humankind, and prevent bloodshed.”
The Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2015
This letter to the editor expresses dissatisfaction that neither the Vatican nor any other Christian churches have “ridiculed the absurd assertion by Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, grand mufti of Jerusalem,” who stated that “there has never been any Jewish temple on the Temple Mount,” which “has been a mosque since creation.” The writer states that such lack of response is “cowering in the face of Muslim bullying,” particularly in view of the fact that the New Testament explicitly states in Luke 2:41-52 that Jesus and his parents went to Jerusalem for Passover and that Jesus remained behind in the Temple.
HaModia, October 30, 2015
This article tells, in detail, the story of the 1969 arson at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, perpetrated by Denis Michael Rohan of Australia. Rohan was speedily caught, but as he was found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia (making such declarations during his trial as that he was “king of Jerusalem”), he was declared guilty but not responsible for his actions and therefore hospitalized in a mental institution. The article further states that from the day of the fire and onward, popular Arab opinion has considered Rohan to have been in Jewish pay, and that the declaration concerning the state of his mental health was no more than a blind.
Rohan was deported to Australia in 1974, and appears to have remained hospitalized until his death.
The Jerusalem Post, October 30, 2015
This article states the opinion that by insisting on ascending the Temple Mount, Jewish zealots “have sculpted an idol” and “are rejecting Zionism’s two empirical conclusions from centuries of exile—that a nation can have only one home, and God can have many.”
Film
The Jerusalem Post, October 30, 2015
This article reviews Isaac Hertz’s 84-minute documentary, One Rock, Three Religions. This “lavishly shot film” aims to portray the complex layers of political and religious meaning at the Temple Mount. The film includes graphic images of the results of historic and contemporary violence both in Israel and abroad, and intersperses them with images of today’s Jerusalem. The article quotes Jewish, Christian, and Muslim figures calling for joint Jewish and Muslim jurisdiction on the Temple Mount and “peace and neighborliness based on universal spiritual values,” but ends by wondering if Jerusalem’s “modern day sicarii” will “subscribe to Hollywood’s saccharine version of the Holy City.”
One Rock, Three Religions will be screened at Jerusalem’s Cinematheque on December 10.
Archaeology
Sha’a Tova, October 22, 2015
Excavations at Tel el-Hamam in southern Jordan have recently uncovered remains of buildings and other artifacts. One such find is a wall 5.2 meters thick and 10 meters tall, which are dimensions appropriate to a city wall. This wall is built of scores of mud bricks, which would have required a large number of workers. Remains of towers and ramparts were found as well. Professor Steve Collins of Southwest Trinity University in New Mexico, the leader of the dig, is convinced that these remains, which testify to the presence of a metropolis, are in fact the remains of biblical Sodom