An Easter service in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (Flash 90)
By DAVID J. MICHAELS
The following letter has been sent to over a dozen of the most senior church leaders in Jerusalem, with copies to officials at major Christian bodies abroad.
I write with a request: for your forgiveness.
As a representative of the oldest Jewish communal organization – B’nai B’rith International, which includes members of many backgrounds in over 50 countries, including Israel, where we have been present in Jerusalem since 1888 – I feel obliged to express my revulsion over new reported incidents of spitting at Christian clergy in certain areas of the Holy City. I feel especially obliged to do so as an Orthodox Jew.
Though these acts are committed by a decided minority of young, ostensibly highly observant yeshiva students, the fact that many leaders and seminarians identifiable as Christian have experienced them compels me to ensure you know that Jews overwhelmingly find this behavior disgraceful and intolerable.
In various parts of the world, there clearly remain problems of acute anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism; demonstrations of hostility toward Christians by individual religious Jews make combating these problems even harder. Read the rest on:
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