Local church leaders had voiced their strong opposition to Israel’s plan to transfer land containing Christian holy sites from church ownership to the state for a national park expansion, denouncing it as a “premeditated attack on the Christians in the Holy Land,” according to a statement by leaders of the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic Churches.
Read MoreA standing–room only crowd of 500 packed the Heichal Ya’acov synagogue in Jerusalem this week to pay their final respects to Esther Pollard, the wife of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard. Esther Pollard, 68, died on Jan. 31 of septic shock complicated by COVID-19. She was also battling breast cancer.
Read More(ANALYSIS) After the mismanagement of a Jewish festival in Meron, Israel in which 45 pious Jews were crushed to death in a stampede and tens of thousands more exposed to COVID-19, there was only one reasonable course for the government to follow in advance of last week’s planned Baba Sali celebration – cancel it. And then flip-flop.
Read MoreThe prospects for peace in the Middle East nudged forward at the end of 2021 when Palestinian Authority security forces foiled two attempts to set fire to Joseph’s Tomb, a site revered by Jews, Christians, Samaritans and Muslims that has long seen sectarian violence.
Read MorePalestinian protests in the West Bank and COVID-19 restrictions amid the rise of the omicron and delta variants are dampening Christmas tourism for the second year in Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem. Israel hopes that its domestic tourists will still turn out for the celebrations.
Read MorePlans to build two skyscrapers near a historic synagogue in London are sparking controversy and pushback from the U.K.’s Jewish community. The buildings would block the natural light that illuminates the sacred space and contributes to its ambience.
Read More(ANALYSIS) This week, Samaritans are celebrating Sukkot — one month after Jews. The ranks of the once mighty Samaritan people reached 3 million in biblical times but were reduced by persecution and apostasy to 146 by 1918. Today they number 814: Half live on a mountaintop in the West Bank, and half live along coastal plains in Israel.
Read More(ANALYSIS) After completing the decades-long construction of the Jacob’s Well Greek Orthodox Church in the Palestinian city Nablus in 2018, Archimandrite Ioustinos, 81, has an equally lofty ambition to fulfill before he retires.
Read MoreA new Holocaust Museum in Porto, Portugal tells the story of the more than 100,000 Jewish refugees who passed through Porto and Lisbon desperate to book passage from the neutral country to the United States during WWII to escape the Nazis.
Read More(OPINION) An Israeli reflects on the recent violence in Jerusalem that has killed at least 30 people, set off when thousands of flag-waving Jewish youth celebrating Israel’s victory over Arabs in the 1967 Six Day War marched down an alley where Muslim activists had arrived during Ramadan to pray at a holy site revered by both Muslims and Jews.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Mister Rogers must be posthumously pleased with the recent decision by Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Congregation to hire “starchitect” Daniel Libeskind to remodel the synagogue complex desecrated by a White supremacist gunman in October 2018. After three years, life may begin to return to normal in Squirrel Hill, Mister Rogers’ all-American neighborhood where love and tolerance used to trump the bile of hate and racism.
Read MoreIsrael observed a day of national mourning on Sunday, May 2 for the 45 Jewish worshippers crushed to death in a stampede just after midnight Friday. It’s the biggest civilian mass causality in Israel’s 73-year history. More than 150 pilgrims suffered injuries. An estimated 100,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews had gathered for the annual Lag b'Omer festival, despite warnings for years that the site was not safe for big crowds.
Read MoreOn Friday, April 23, Christie’s in New York will auction the late Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg’s unparalleled collection of 17 illuminated medieval Bible manuscripts and more than 200 books from before 1501. Alexandre played a leading role in recapturing his family’s looted artwork from the Nazis and later retired in Manhattan where he built his Bible collection with Elaine.
Read MoreAn Afghan official told Religion Unplugged that the country plans to repatriate various ancient artifacts they believe were looted from their national museum in the nineties during civil war, including a medieval Hebrew prayer book now in the Museum of the Bible’s possession in Washington, D.C. The 1200-year-old prayer book is the world’s oldest Hebrew manuscript after the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Read MoreThe Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem is believed to mark the spot where the tree was felled to make the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Several legends theorize about its founding, linked to Abraham’s nephew Lot; the mother of Byzantine Emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor who sojourned in the Holy Land in 326; and Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, said to have founded the monastery at the behest of a Georgian prince.
Read MoreFranciscans in the Holy Land, a Catholic order that’s preserved Christian sites in Jerusalem since the Middle Ages, have celebrated Lent for years by following the path step by step that Jesus may have taken nearly 2,000 years ago on his 40-day fasting journey through the Judean Desert.
Read MoreThe Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Mar. 16 that more Dead Sea Scrolls — among other relics — were found in a cave in the Judean Desert. The fragments contain passages from Zechariah and Nahum, among other books.
Read MoreBerliners are debating renaming Pacelliallee – a major street named after Rome-born Eugenio Pacelli, better known as Pope Pius XII, to honor former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (1898-1978). Pius XII served as a Vatican ambassador in Berlin and has been accused of anti-Semitism and sympathizing with Nazis during the Holocaust. Meir was Israel’s first and only female prime minister.
Read MoreThe National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul claims a 1,200-year-old Hebrew prayer book at the Museum of the Bible was stolen from their collection in the nineties. It’s the latest in a series of scandals about looted and forged antiquities that has rocked the Museum of the Bible since its 2017 opening in Washington, D.C.
Read MoreThe landmark mansion built 88 years ago by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem who spent much of World War II in Berlin as a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, is slated to become a synagogue in a future 56-apartment Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem. The Israeli settler organization Ateret Cohanim is backing the project.
Read More
