Legacy of a Latter-Day Madonna and Child : Symbol of Christmas: Jerusalem Clinic

The first patients arrived at the Spafford Childrens’ Center just after 8 a.m. Wednesday, at about the same time as the donkey that had carried a load of heating oil for the clinic up the steep stone steps of the walled Old City from the Damascus Gate.

Mostly it was Arab mothers who brought their infants and toddlers in for a check-up, for vaccinations, or just to be weighed. But there was an occasional father as well. Several of the women wore ankle-length robes and gray head scarves identifying them as Muslim fundamentalists, while others dressed in Western style.

Many of the parents had been treated here when they were infants. But few, if any, realized that they and their children are extensions of an extraordinary event on another Christmas Eve in 1925--an event perhaps more in keeping with the true spirit of Christmas than the annual holiday festivities celebrated a few miles away under unusually heavy Israeli army guard on Wednesday night in Bethlehem’s Manger Square.

The story began more than a century ago with a prominent Chicago lawyer named Horatio Spafford and his wife, Anna, devout Christians who, after the deaths of five of their seven children, immigrated to Jerusalem and founded a small commune that became known as the American Colony.

The Spafford Childrens’ Center is located in their original home, inside the Old City walls just east of the Damascus Gate. As the commune grew, it moved outside the walls to a larger site nearby, which is still owned by the Spaffords’ descendants and is now operated as the American Colony hotel.

One of the Spafford’s daughters, Bertha Spafford Vester, is the central character in the events of Christmas Eve, 1925.

She had just left a holiday tea party at the original family home, then being operated as a community charity to teach young Arab girls dressmaking and handicrafts. She was to join her husband and children for an evening of caroling under the stars in the fields below Bethlehem, where shepherds are said to have first learned of Jesus’ birth.

Swaddling of Newborn

But as she hurried down the hill toward the Damascus Gate, Vester came upon an Arab man walking the other way, helping his obviously sick wife. The woman carried a bundle of filthy rags which, on closer inspection, turned out to be the swaddling of a newborn baby.

The man said he had brought his wife six hours by donkey to find care for her, only to be turned away at the hospital because of the holiday. As Vester would recall in her memoirs: “I was greatly touched. I thought as I stood beside the mother and child that I was rushing off to sing carols in the shepherds’ fields to commemorate the birth of a babe who was born in a stable and placed in a manger because there was no room in the inn, and here before me stood a rustic Madonna and babe, and, metaphorically speaking, no room for them in the inn.”

Vester used her influence to gain the woman admission into the hospital, but the woman died the same night. The next day, a sunny, spring-like Jerusalem Christmas, the Arab man brought his newborn son to the Vester home and asked if they would care for him. He said he lived in a cave, and “if I take my baby boy home he will die.”

Hired Nurse for Baby

The Vesters obliged, arranging a room in the dressmaking school for him and hiring a nurse. They named the baby Noel.

In less than a week they took in two more infants and soon the school was moved and the premises turned into a full-time babies’ home. Later it became a childrens’ hospital before being scaled back for lack of funds in 1971 to its current status as a clinic.

Bertha Spafford Vester died in 1968, and whatever happened to Noel is “a great mystery,” said Vester’s daughter, Anna Grace Lind, in an interview here Wednesday. She recalled Noel as “a nice boy who worked for a while at a United Nations refugee camp in Jericho.

“He used to visit my mother,” said Lind, now about 80. “Then he decided to go to Damascus. He came to say goodby and we’ve never heard from him since.” That was in 1953, she recalled, and her mother “did everything she could to find him,” without success.

Patients Mostly Muslim

The clinic has become an ecumenical fixture of the Old City, treating about 26,000 patients last year alone. It is run by Christians, but most of the patients are Muslim. Two of the doctors are Jewish, and the Israeli government donates some of its medicine.

Things have changed much over the many Christmases she has spent in the Holy Land, Lind said.

“In the old days it was terribly quiet,” she said. “You went out there (to Bethlehem) by yourself. You sang carols either in Bethlehem or Shepherds’ Field. You walked into the church, and it was all very calm and peaceful because there were no tourists.”

Things changed most dramatically after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israeli troops captured Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank of the Jordan River from Jordan. Tourism increased sharply, but so did the fear of politically-motivated terrorist incidents, and those related developments have shaped Christmas observance in Bethlehem to this day.

2 Months of Unrest

The Israeli army deployed one of its largest troop contingents ever in and around the hilltop town Wednesday after nearly two months of political unrest in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. The unrest has left four Arabs and one Jew dead, dozens more wounded or injured, and scores arrested.

An estimated 70,000 tourists are expected here during the year-end holidays this year, but hoteliers and Bethlehem merchants have been complaining in recent days that this is one of the worst years for business since 1967. They blame the political climate for frightening away thousands more pilgrims--particularly Americans, who in contrast to past years, were noticeable mostly by their absence.

The tourists who did come enjoyed a beautiful, sunny yuletide Wednesday in Manger Square. Santa Claus arrived atop a blue sports car in the morning while an Israeli police band played Christmas music.

A Plea for Peace

Bethlehem Mayor Elias Friej made his annual plea for “peace on Earth and good will towards men” in one of the world’s most warlike regions. Then he hosted a cocktail party attended, among hundreds of others, by Israel’s top three officials: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

On Wednesday evening, a few hundred select guests attended Christmas Eve services at the Church of the Nativity, built over the spot where tradition holds that Jesus was born. And thousands of other visitors thronged Manger Square to watch the services on an outdoor screen or enjoy the 16 choirs on hand to sing carols.

Lind and her associates at the Spafford Center decided to skip the crowds and security checks of Bethlehem. “There’s got to be all this very difficult inspection and all,” she said. But she prefers a quieter Christmas.

So on Wednesday evening, Lind enjoyed dinner with Roger and Margot Clermont, members of a charismatic Christian community called City of the Lord which occupies one floor in the old Spafford house. And after dinner, the group adjourned to the roof, where they sang Christmas carols while enjoying a spectacular nighttime view of Jerusalem’s walled Old City and the new sections on the surrounding hillsides.