By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

HAIFA, Israel (CNS) — At the back of a stone house, in a small chapel decorated with green plants, icons and Easter lilies, two dozen members of Haifa’s Hebrew-speaking Catholic community gathered for Mass.

Orthodox Christians pray at the Stone of Unction, believed to be the place where the body of Jesus was prepared for burial, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher during Good Friday services for the Eastern Orthodox churches in Jerusalem’s Old City April 17. Many Eastern churches mark Holy Week and Easter according to the Julian calendar. CNS PHOTO/YANNIS BEHRAKIS/REUTERS

Jesuit Father David Neuhaus, vicar for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, presided. Of the four Hebrew-speaking communities Father Neuhaus oversees, the little parish in Haifa has the most members with a Jewish background. Many — like Miryam Rosenthal, a 35-year-old nurse — have a Catholic mother and a nonobservant Jewish father.

When she was a child, she said, her French mother would take her to Haifa’s Arab neighborhood — where the Christians were — at Christmastime, and she remembers singing songs about “Baba Noel” or Santa Claus.

“I was raised in a family that was very open,” she said. “I went to church with my mom and to synagogue with my dad. When I was 8, I decided to be a Catholic.”

Still, it was not until she was an adult that she began seriously to search for a community where she felt she belonged. First, she looked for a French- or English-speaking community, never imagining there was a Hebrew-speaking parish.
“I was like, ‘What? Mass in Hebrew?’ It was like something from out of this world,” she said.

Rosenthal, who was baptized at the Easter Vigil in 2007, said she and other Hebrew-speaking Catholics will be on one of the 10 buses carrying Haifa’s Catholics — mostly Arab-speaking Melkite Catholics — to the papal Mass in Nazareth.

Before each Saturday evening Mass in Hebrew, members of the community spend an hour studying the Bible. Father Neuhaus, a Scripture scholar, said, “It is not a prayer group; it is not a form of piety, but real study, adult catechesis.” Hebrew-speaking Catholic communities also meet for Mass in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Beersheba.

While there are “very few occasions for bringing Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking Catholics together,” he said, the only Catholic Church in Beersheba belongs to the Hebrew-speaking community, so Arabic speakers often worship with them.

“Christians here are divided, not only along political lines, but along cultural lines. There are Arabs who are Catholics and there are Israeli Jews who are Catholics,” he said.

Building unity “is a constant challenge and an important one,” said the Jesuit, who also describes himself as an Israeli Jew.

Father Neuhaus said another part of his job is “to try to be a voice of the Catholic Church in the midst of Israeli, Hebrew-speaking society; to be someone from within who is able to present what is the Church, what is Christianity, who is Jesus Christ in an idiom that is not foreign to the Jewish, Hebrew-speaking society.”

The priest said that more Hebrew will be used at Pope Benedict’s liturgies than was used when Pope John Paul II visited in 2000, but it will still be very little because of the sensitivity surrounding the tiny Hebrew-speaking Catholic community’s place in the Holy Land.

“Part of our vocation as a Hebrew-speaking community,” he said, is to raise the consciousness of the entire Catholic Church with regard to the Jewish roots of Christianity and the need for repentance for centuries of teaching contempt for the Jews.

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