Fanaticism Blamed for Wave of Attacks on Religious Properties in Israel

The blackened, 100-year-old choir stall has the texture of parched alligator skin, ashes cover the floor and the acrid smell of smoke lingers in the air at St. Paul’s Evangelical (Episcopal) Church on the fringe of Jerusalem’s Musrara section.

“This is the second time in two weeks,” said Nabil Zumot, head of the church’s diocesan property department, as he showed a visitor the damage.

Brigade Fire Chief Zvi Handel said the fire, which broke out in the pre-dawn hours of Dec. 11, was not an accident. Neither, he said, was a similar fire at the same church on Nov. 26.

The police detained two ultra-Orthodox Jews in connection with the incidents. But they were released for what police spokesman Rafi Levy said was lack of evidence. The fires are still under investigation.

Attacks Condemned

Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Religious Affairs Minister Zevulun Hammer and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith have all issued statements condemning the attacks.

“The Jewish people are particularly sensitive to such incidents,” Hammer said, “because of the numerous times in their own history when their places of worship were burned.”

The recent fires at St. Paul’s are only the latest in a growing number of plots, attacks and incidents of vandalism against religious properties here in recent years.

Some people link the incidents to an accelerating trend of religious intolerance, directed at different streams of Judaism as well as at Christian and Muslim religious institutions. Others say they are part of longstanding religious tensions that are unexceptional given this region’s unique status as a holy land for the three great monotheistic faiths.

Fanaticism Blamed

The Rt. Rev. Samir Kafity, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, sees the attacks on St. Paul’s as part of an “unfortunate . . . resurgence of religious fanaticism all over the Middle East.”

“Israel is no exception,” he said in an interview. “We witness these incidents here and there by those who claim they have the exclusive right and the exclusive religious understanding of the significance of the land.”

Another Episcopal church, in Acre, was burned last April, but the list of religious targets goes well beyond the Anglicans.

Shortly after the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem was opened to tourists last year, someone spread excrement around one its rooms. The year before there was an attempt to burn down the meeting place here of the Messianic Assembly, a congregation of Jews who accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah. In 1982, arson was blamed for a fire that destroyed a Baptist church in Jerusalem.

Mosques Vandalized

Among recent Muslim targets were the Hassan Bek mosque in Jaffa, which was the focus of a grenade attack in 1985. Two months later Jewish settlers vandalized a mosque in Halhoul, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in retaliation for a rifle attack on a Jewish bus the night before. And in 1984, a so-called Jewish underground was blamed for plotting, among other things, to blow up the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem.

Tension between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews was particularly severe in the spring of 1986, when vandals set fire to a Tel Aviv synagogue, shocking the nation.

Clearly, motives vary in these attacks. The synagogue arson was apparently a protest against what secular Jews, and even more liberal strains of Judaism, see as ultra-Orthodox attempts to dictate the character of national life here.

The attacks on mosques are as much or more an outgrowth of the Arab-Israeli national conflict as they are of religious differences.

Sensitive Issue

And the prime Christian targets in recent years have been churches or congregations seen as active in proselytizing--an extraordinarily sensitive issue in a country whose reason for being is to provide a safe haven for a people historically victimized in Christian nations.

But all have in common a fanaticism that undermines Israel’s--and particularly Jerusalem’s--oft-stated pledge to protect religious pluralism.

Why St. Paul’s might be a target is not clear. Both nationalist and anti-missionary motives could be involved.

The Anglican presence here goes back to the mid-19th Century. It was intended in part to convert the Jews of the area, but the Anglican Church is essentially an indigenous, Arab institution. Kafity is a Palestinian Arab from Haifa. Except for services for a small British expatriate community, rituals are conducted in Arabic.

Call for Palestinian Rights

The Rev. Canon Riah abu el Assal, head of the Christ Evangelical Episcopal Church in Nazareth, is an outspoken proponent of Palestinian rights who last month reiterated his view that “nothing less than a flag, a passport, a home for the Palestinian millions of hopeless and helpless” can be acceptable compensation for “years of ruined dreams and broken families.”

Said Kafity: “The indigenous church is much older than the state of Israel. So we are attached to our churches, our land, our people and our culture. And you cannot undo this attachment.”

On the other hand, St. Paul’s has not been used for Anglican services for some time. It is rented to a Pentacostal congregation, which holds services in the basement and which reportedly includes some Jewish converts.

One veteran Christian clergyman here, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the newer evangelical congregations are particular targets of harassment by right-wing Orthodox Jewish groups.

Not Pluralistic

“It’s sort of axiomatic with the evangelical leaders,” he said, “that you’re going to have Yad Lachim (an anti-missionary organization) people in your congregation, and somebody’s going to have a file on you. In principle, the country is committed to religious pluralism, but in fact it’s not, at every level.”

The Musrara section in which St. Paul’s is situated is one of Jerusalem’s poorer neighborhoods, plagued with drugs and other problems. It is adjacent to Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim section and has been the object of an extensive renewal program funded by the Los Angeles Jewish community.

According to Zumot, symbols and slogans of Kach, the anti-Arab political party of right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane, were found daubed on St. Paul’s cornerstone after the latest arson attack. The graffiti had been covered with gray paint when a reporter visited recently.

Kach slogans also were found on the burned Anglican church in Acre last April, according to the police.

Pattern Dismissed

City officials dismiss any suggestion of a pattern of dangerous religious intolerance here.

“We think it to be the work of individual crazies and not a tendency in the community,” said a spokesman for Mayor Kollek about the St. Paul’s arson attacks. “Christians are treated with respect and courtesy and propriety by all people in the city.”

Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the Anti-Defamation League’s Jerusalem office, agreed in an interview that the St. Paul’s case is an isolated incident. But, he said, it carries with it the danger of a backlash that could harm progress in Christian-Jewish relations.

Rosen, a former chief rabbi of Ireland, said it also demonstrates “that we live in what generally is an environment where people have very strong beliefs and may not have . . . the same spirit of tolerance that we tend to expect in the West.”

“The majority of this country is not from a Western pluralistic background,” he said. “It’s either from Eastern Europe or from North Africa and Asia, all of which are not environments in which . . . pluralistic concepts are familiar. Therefore, it’s going to take some time before this society matures to a level, which it hopefully will, where one can live comfortably . . . with antagonistic ideological perspectives.”