(AP) Matti Friedman - The schedules for Mass at the two Roman Catholic churches in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, reveal a change that has dramatically altered the face of Christianity in the Holy Land. The two Masses in Arabic for the town's native Arab Christian population are outnumbered by four in English, attended mainly by Filipina caregivers. Then there are others in Spanish, for South Americans; French, for African migrants; three South Asian languages, including Konkani, spoken in the Indian district of Goa; and, for a generation of Christians raised among Israel's Jewish majority, Hebrew. In September, a colorful celebration for Indian Catholics alone drew 2,000 people. That's twice the total number of native Catholics in the parish. For centuries, Christianity here meant the ancient communities of Christian Arabs. The past two decades, however, have seen one of the most significant influxes of Christians into the Holy Land since the Crusades, and it has created a wholly new Christian landscape shaped by the realities of Israel. If one counts all of the people in Israel who are neither Jewish nor Muslim, these newcomers outnumber Arab Christians by more than five to one. On a recent Sunday, the chapel at the Ratisbonne monastery in downtown Jerusalem rang with the sound of hymns in Tagalog, one of the languages of the Philippines. Most of the worshippers were women who serve as caregivers for elderly Israelis. Today there are 40,000 Filipino workers in Israel. There are now several thousand children born to foreign workers who speak Hebrew as a first language and celebrate Jewish holidays with their classmates. Among the 1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union who began moving to Israel en masse in the early 1990s, about a third were not Jewish but qualified for citizenship because they had a Jewish spouse or lineage. Among them were an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 practicing Christians, mostly Orthodox.
2011-10-28 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive