Jerusalem, Sep 27, 2019 / 08:30 am (CNA).- There are no tourists in Jerusalem’s Talbieh neighborhood. And even locals don’t always notice the Capuchin Franciscans coming and going from a non-descript three-house compound in the neighborhood. It does not stand out. But for many of those who know it, the St. Rachel Center is an indispensable refuge and a source of grace.
The St. Rachel Center serves a kind of immigrant unique to Israel: those born in the country, but living there illegally.
The strong economy in Israel is a magnet for many immigrants, mostly women, from places like the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India and Eritrea, who find jobs as housekeepers, caretakers of the elderly, or as maids in hotels. But the state of Israel admits those immigrants only under very strict rules: they cannot bring family members, and they have to commit to not get married or have children in Israel. Violating any of those terms would immediately void their visas and would make them eligible for deportation.
But life happens. And immigrant women who get pregnant sometimes opt to remain illegally in the country, knowing that their children, ineligible for Israeli citizenship, will live in a legal limbo.
The need of daycare for the growing number of such children has created a cottage industry of “children’s warehouses,” especially in major cities like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. In such warehouses, kids are left mostly unsupervised, usually in deplorable conditions.
To respond to this need, the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew Speaking Catholics in Jerusalem started the St. Rachel Center in September 2016. The center aims to provide safe, healthy and nurturing day care for the children of immigrants.
This September, a group of Catholic leaders visiting the Holy Land through an initiative of the Christian advocacy group known as the Philos Project were received at St. Rachel House by its director, Italian priest Fr. Benedetto di Bitonto. Constantly interrupted by the joyous children who flock to him, Fr. Benedetto showed off the spacious one-floor building, with two playgrounds and two large rooms, one of them serving as a nursery for babies.
Another large room serves as a meeting place for the children who come to the center after school. Other rooms serve as offices, study and meeting rooms, and there is also a small apartment for volunteers, most of them young European Catholics.
Each school day, parents begin to drop off around 30 children at 7:30 in the morning, usually picking them up at 5:30 pm. Then, an additional 40 children arrive at 1:30 pm for an after school program that lasts until 6:00 pm. This program is especially important for the kids, since most of their parents are not sufficiently familiar with Hebrew and thus are not able to assist their children with homework.
“We try to provide as much after-school activities as possible to these kids, most of whom are integrated in Israeli school system,” Fr. di Bitonto told CNA.
With his long beard, bright eyes and easy manner, Fr. di Bitonto seems like a man of long experience at the center. Very few would imagine that was ordained a priest in May, just four months ago.
But there is an interesting story behind “Fr Benny,” and there is a reason he seems like such a seasoned leader.
Benedetto grew up in a devout Southern Italian Catholic family, and first heard a call when he was 18. He decided to study comparative literature, including Hebrew, until age 24, when he joined the seminary in his Diocese of Pozzuoli. But he stayed only for a year. He went back to college to pursue his Ph.D., which led him to study Hebrew literature in Jerusalem, where he fell in love with the small local Catholic community.
After leading a group of pilgrims to World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid, he returned to the seminary to become a priest at the service of the Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Jerusalem.
By the time of his priestly ordination, “Benny” had accumulated significant cultural, pastoral and spiritual experience.
During the visit of the Philos Project, Fr. Benedetto led the group to the small chapel where an icon of Rachel the Matriarch dominates one of the walls.
“Why did we choose St. Rachel for this house? Because she struggled to have children and died giving birth to her younger son,” Fr. Benny explained.
“She is therefore the model of the mother willing to do anything for their children, and that’s what we aspire to do here, with God’s grace.”
Catechism is taught to Catholic kids every afternoon, but, regardless of religion “every child in need of a refuge for the day is welcomed without hesitation,” Fr. di Bitonto explained.
“This is our small contribution to unity, peace and friendship in the Holy Land.”
This hope for peaceful and friendly inter-religious unity in the Holy Land seems to be at the core of Fr. Benedetto’s priestly ministry.
In fact, according to Cécile Klos, a journalist from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem “the participants in the ordination celebration were happy for Benedetto, but also happy to have shared such a strong moment with people who are often very different in origin, language, administrative situation in the country and even religion.”
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I hope the people of Israel come out of this safely. I had the opportunity to go there on a pilgrimage with my church in 2019. It was an immense privilege to walk in so many biblical towns and have daily Mass in all the churches. A beautiful and interesting place. The site of the crucifixion and the tomb was amazing to see and touch. Very spiritually moving. We were there during the Trump administration, and the American embassy had just been moved to Jerusalem. I was so sad to hear news of this attack this morning. Many of those living there are transplanted Americans. Please pray for them.
Israel will prevail, but at a cost. Things will get ugly. The Palestinians blame Israel for their misery and stupidity. Man for man, the Israelis put them to shame.
Palestinians are intelligent people but have been manipulated and misled by Hamas. It’s a tragedy.
Biden built this; he, Valerie Jarret and Obama. The finger prints are obvious. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that many of the munitions Hamas used were sold off from the Ukraine and have our insignias. There is no oversight and Ukraine’s government is the epitome of moral bankruptcy. This news just makes the Lacrimarum Vale that much deeper, darker and loathsome.
From Islamist anti-Semitism is behind Israel’s darkest hour since the Yom Kippur war, by Jake Wallis Simons, October 7, 2023:
Excerpt (with link omitted, bold style added):
In response, sensible voices must be absolutely clear: this was an anti-Semitic attack. It was of a piece with the pogroms carried out by the Cossacks, the Iraqi mobs during the Farhud, and the Nazis.
That last example is especially powerful, as a direct line can be drawn from Hitler to Hamas. During the Second World War, the extremist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, who compared Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes or bacilli, worked with Nazi officials to translate Third Reich ideology into an Arabic context and transmit it into the Middle East via radio, leaflets and other means. His twisted ideology rings loudly in our ears today.
Look at Hamas’s charter. Article 32 – a conspiracy theory which accuses the Zionists of wishing to take over the entire territory between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq, an area of thousands of square miles – says: “Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To describe Hamas as being influenced by Nazi propaganda is insufficient. This is Nazi propaganda.
I don’t believe that this was a surprise attack. It is likely a “playing the victim” strategy.
Interesting comment, considering the Jerusalem Post is suggesting the attack is a contender for the greatest intelligence failure in Israeli history. “How did Israel fall so far to such an inferior enemy?” the tagline asks. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-765254
Perhaps you will claim that the JPost story is also part of the same strategy? A rabbi in Jerusalem claims that the earthquake in Morocco was caused by their king’s call for Jerusalem to become the Palestinian capital. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-761707
Seems like there’s no shortage of dotted-line thinking on both sides.
Which side do you think is playing victim?
After the British occupiers left Palestine, the United Nations 1947 Resolution no. 181 mandated the creation of two nations, Israel and Palestine, each with almost equal land areas. After wars and perpetual tensions through the decades the land area has been disproportionately made unequal by continued Israeli grabbing of Palestinian lands in defiance of UN and international laws leaving the Palestinians with only small portions that is the West Bank and Gaza even as the state of Palestine remains not fully established and sovereign today. While the Western media portray the Palestinians as the bad guys and terrorists, it is actually the Israelis who are so by their continued dispossession and dislocation of the Palestinians in violation of UN and international laws. Even present day pilgrims to the Holy Land can readily see the continued construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank contravening UN and international laws. Seen from this perspective, the modern state of Israel can be compared to China defying UN and international laws like the International Court of Arbitration that judged China’s grabbing of Philippine maritime territory as illegal. Palestinian militants rising against Israel mighty army can be compared to the Filipinos’ decrepit coast guard standing up against China’s bully coast guard as seen more and more on TV news recently.
There are many, many questions that need to be answered about the attack on Israel yesterday. How could a country with intelligence agencies renowned for their ability to infiltrate its enemies and allies alike be caught so flat-footed? This was a major operation and the Mossad apparently had no inkling that it was coming. That is very hard to believe. The surveillance and detection systems at the border were reportedly jammed by Hamas. If that is true, why did this in and of itself not cause an alarm to go off? Where was the world-class Israeli Air Force, which must patrol the relatively short border around the clock? Paragliders sailed right across the border after dawn had already broken without a sign of an Israeli aircraft, which could have easily picked them off. Even more incredibly, there is video of Hamas troops casually cutting through the border fence later in broad daylight with no cover and then streaming through with their pickup trucks and motorcycles in the open desert. Again, an airstrike by jets that could have arrived in a couple of minutes would have wipe these people out in an instant. This is either an epic and astonishing failure of Israel’s entire security apparatus or there is more to this story than what we see on the surface. I don’t pretend to know what happened and am afraid that no one is going to be seriously interested in finding out.
If Israel’s intelligence was taken off guard it should give us pause to wonder where our own defense system may have gaps. There’s no perfect intelligence department. We become complacent at our own peril.
The Gaza strip, and all Palestinian territory, is heavily infiltrated by Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF personnel. *No way were they surprised.*
Israel either made or allowed this to occur–so that they could draw sympathy upon themselves, divert attention from the impending victory of gentile Christian Putin over Jewish Zelensky (bad PR for the Tribe!), and use this event as a pretext to wipe out the Palestinians.
The evidence presented thus far of an attack (fan para-gliders? really? unblocked and unnoticed truck and AFV attacks? really?) with attendant massive Israeli deaths looks suspicious and stagey–though there are probably some real Israel deaths as well. The bigwigs in Tel Aviv–and now Jerusalem–don’t mind killing (or allowing to be killed) a few of the lesser Israelis in order to advance Israeli goals of total dominion over the mid-east.
The effect of this will be to get the US to pony up even more billions for Israel (while Americans in Maui get 700 dollars for their torched homes) and allow Netanyahu to do what he has always wanted to do–genocide the Palestinians.
Also, the linking of the Palestinians to Iran will (of course) be made, and the US will now be easily induced to attack that country, especially as Biden needs a victory–since his proxy war against Russia is faring so badly.
Many Americans, including Christians are waking up however. They no longer believe the traditional 70s and 80s propaganda about dem Evil Iranians and dem Evil Ay-Rabs and dose good Israelis.
The US is a fast-fading empire. It literally does *nothing* right (see Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine). It is ruled by wicked and foolish men (and now women). But it does have, unlike Iraq, many weapons of mass destruction, and a mad beast is always dangerous.
Anyway, break out the popcorn and enjoy the Apocalyptic show! (I’m kidding, pray and make sacrifices for peace!).