Resurrection Land

Thousands of Christian pilgrims from all over the world are thronging to Jerusalem for Holy Week services that began on Palm Sunday. Participating in the “Procession Palmarum,” they bore aloft palm fronds on their way from Bethpage down the Mount of Olives and into the Old City through St. Stephen’s Gate. On Maundy Thursday, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre became again the scene of the “mandatum,” the washing-of-the-feet ceremony.

Beginning early on Good Friday, thousands of pilgrims participate in the traditional Way of the Cross procession. They set out from the first of the fourteen stations, near St. Stephen’s (the Lion’s) Gate, and, proceeding along the Via Dolorosa, retrace Jesus’ last steps leading up to Calvary. Pilgrims from the four corners of the earth split into national groupings, some bearing aloft a wooden cross, a facsimile of the one Jesus carried on his last walk. Holy Week services reach their climax on Saturday night amid the echoes of “Resurrexit sicut dixit” (“he has risen as he said”) in front of the empty tomb.

At Easter dawn as the last stars break their watch over Jerusalem, Christian pilgrims set out for services at the various Catholic and Protestant churches. The first is held at sunrise outside St. Andrew’s Chapel (Church of Scotland) on a hill across the Hinnom Valley from Mt. Zion. There, sitting in the open, the congregation faces the eastern Judean hills watching the sun rise—pink and then purple—at five A.M. and chants while the bells toll in the distance, “Jesus Christ is risen today, hallelujah!”

An hour later, across the valley and inside Jaffa Gate, the Latin Patriarch, Monsignor Giacomo Biltritti, leaves his residence to officiate at a pontifical high mass at the Holy Sepulchre. Flanked by twenty priests, he is preceded by eight kawasses dressed in traditional Turkish uniforms and bearing silver swords, who thump their staves on the ground as they walk.

Evangelical services begin at the Garden Tomb outside the ancient city at 6:30 A.M. and run until early afternoon, with various groups conducting a service each hour. The annual passion drama as re-enacted in Jerusalem always carries an authentic ring, for in the Land of the Resurrection, the untombed Christ is a known member of the family, a Middle Eastern elder brother. The resurrection theme carries the week despite the scars of old wars and the scares of new.

How deep does it all run? Does it spill over into the year and resurrect expressions of hope and peace?

Last summer a group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians led by Brother Bruno Hussar, a Catholic priest of Jewish birth, established Israel’s second non-Jewish settlement in Israel (the first was Nes Ammim, a Christian kibbutz; see April 24, 1970, issue). The interfaith group calls itself “Neve Shalom,” meaning “habitation of peace,” and plans to settle permanently in the Valley of Ajalon about twenty miles west of Jerusalem. The 125-acre site, situated in former no-man’s-land on the borders between Israel and Jordan (now occupied by Israel), has lain idle for nearly twenty-three years.

This past summer the pioneers of Neve Shalom lived nearby at the ruins of the Crusader Fortress, Toron, where Richard the Lion-Hearted once stayed. The local group was joined by volunteers from Israel, Holland, Belgium, New Zealand, and the United States.

Brother Bruno, also founder of the Saint Isaiah House in Jerusalem, a Jewish-Christian dialogue center, said the idea for Neve Shalom came to him following the June 1967 Six-Day War. “I saw the People of the Book—all sons of Abraham—Jews, Muslims, and Christians, as sharing a common hope,” he says. “The Jews await the Messiah and his kingdom of justice and peace; the Muslims look for the resurrection of righteous judgment; and the Christians expect the Messiah to come again. All are awaiting the Day of God, which is a shared eschatological expectation, and this common hope brought us together.”

Neve Shalom would like to be an eschatological prefiguration of Isaiah’s vision of a peaceful life on earth described by the prophet in chapters 2, 11, 52, and 60, according to Hussar. The Neve Shalom vision itself is taken from Isaiah 2:4: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares.…”

“We would like it to be a community where men strive for peace, perhaps imperfectly, and where they try to live in brotherhood in a diversified society, but loving each other in diversity and trying to overcome the causes of hatred and pride,” Hussar adds.

The atmosphere of this land is hot with the breath and the threat of war. But its soil cannot keep dead His deed. This is Resurrection Land.

‘Never Again’

The international stir over oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union won new attention last month. In Washington, 689 persons were arrested for blocking traffic during a protest demonstration. In Moscow, Soviet rabbis held a national conference to proclaim their well-being and to denounce the Israeli government and Zionism.

The arrests in Washington were said to have constituted the largest number for sit-in-civil disobedience in the city’s history. Most of those arrested were Jews, and all were released the same day after posting $10 collateral.

The Washington rally was led by Rabbi Meir David Kahane, head of the Jewish Defense League, which he founded in 1968. The league’s slogan is “Never Again.” Its chief activity of late has been to hound Soviet diplomats in the United States and to campaign for American sanctions against the Soviet Union.

Kahane is a 38-year-old militant, the son of a Jewish scholar and himself a scholar and holder of a law degree. He urges Jews to “use as much violence as is necessary to survive.” Jewish leaders have either been silent about him or have repudiated his methodology. Several weeks ago in Belgium, a world conference of Jewish leaders had him expelled. He has been arrested several times during protest demonstrations.

Kahane’s cause, if not his tactics, has wide support. Among politicians who have spoken up in behalf of Soviet Jewry is Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He said in a recent speech that the U. S. State Department is not giving “full and active support to diplomatic initiatives” aimed at securing freer emigration of Jews and others from the Soviet Union.

The Moscow meeting of rabbis was apparently inspired by Soviet authorities to counteract the campaign among Jews in the West. A group of dissident Jews told newsmen outside that the rabbis painted too rosy a picture. Some Soviet Jews are being allowed to emigrate to Israel, but many more say they want to go and are forbidden.

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