Journalist Lela Gilbert

http://www.lapidomedia.com/node/2885

JERUSALEM’S warm air was fragrant with wood smoke and the sky alight with fireworks heralding dozens of weddings.

It was April 28 – Lag B’Omer – the only day in the Jewish calendar when weddings and other happy occasions can be celebrated during an otherwise somber stretch of days between Passover and Pentecost (or Shavuot in Hebrew, meaning Feast of Weeks marking the giving of the Law to Moses).

Apart from Orthodox Jewish circles, Lag B’Omer is one of the least known Jewish holidays. But it is a light-filled occasion, marked by festive celebrations, music and bonfires.

Traditional Jewish communities around the world revel in this festival in the midst of seasonal semi-mourning.

In one unique ritual, thousands have traditionally gathered in Tunisia to make their Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to Djerba, a resort island where many of Tunisia’s last remaining Jews live.

The origins of Lag B’Omer are obscure.  It means ‘33rd day of the omer’ and has to do with Levitical sacrifice prescriptions (an omer being a measurement of barley), and later kabbalistic mysticism.

Even for secular Jews, it has become an occasion for joy.  The town of Djerba hosts colourful processions and candle-lit festivities over three days.

Djerba’s synagogue is 2,500-years old, the oldest in Africa.  Legend has it that Jews, fleeing the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, founded the synagogue in 586 BC.

But celebrations took place under heavy security again this year. In 2002 terrorists attacked the celebrations; Tunisia and the Lag B’Omer pilgrimage have never fully recovered.

Women in Djerba mark Lag B’Omer. Photo: Jewish Refugees

This year, in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ – which began with the self-immolation of a Tunisian vendor – Al-Arabiya reported, ‘More than a dozen army trucks were stationed at Ghriba [Djerba] itself, where an Al-Qaeda attack in 2002 killed 21 people, with police checkpoints set up around the nearby Jewish neighborhoods and on the road linking the airport to the tourist zone.’

In 2011, during the roiling Arab uprising, the pilgrimage was cancelled. In 2012 it resumed, but quietly. Thankfully, Tunisia’s Lag B’Omer 2013 observance passed off without violence.

Meanwhile, as Jews held their collective breath during the pilgrimage, Tunisia’s 24,000 Christians also watched events with concern: their community is also historically at risk.

Open Doors International’s World Watch lists Tunisia as thirtieth among the world’s 50 worst persecutors of Christians.

Muslim-background converts to Christianity are particularly endangered; they can face violence, rape and even murder. In what was once a moderately secular country, Salafist numbers swell and dangers to non-Muslims abound.

Islamists pose threats to both Jews and Christians as well as other minorities, and their actions often embody the jihadi motto, ‘First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People.’

Around 850,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim lands in the mid-twentieth century and few remain.

Today Christians in those same communities face intensifying violence and are fleeing. This pattern is evident throughout the Middle East – most notably Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

The newly released book, Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christiansfocuses on the dangers faced by Christians worldwide; reporting that much of today’s anti-Christian persecution is taking place in Muslim-majority states.

This has caught the attention of Jewish readers who often raise the question, ‘Why aren’t Christians doing more about this persecution?’

Jews have historically looked after their own far-flung communities during periods of intense oppression.

Persecution: Europe’s neo-Nazis remain a threat

And they’ve had a lot of experience thanks to 2,000 years of discrimination and mistreatment, in earlier days at the hands of the Church, and later pogroms and Soviet cruelties, the Holocaust, and now neo-Nazis and Islamist jihadis.

Cruel lessons have taught Jewish communities the importance of unity, solidarity and activism in the face of abuse.

Budapest

Meanwhile, as Tunisian Jews held their breath, Budapest in Hungary hosted the World Jewish Congress (WJC) annual meeting 5 – 7 May.

Neo-Nazi movements and anti-Semitism in Hungary prompted the WJC – one of innumerable Jewish advocacy groups around the world which usually meets in Jerusalem – to demonstrate its solidarity with Hungary’s vulnerable Jews. Angry protests decried the conference, but to no avail.

Western activists against anti-Christian persecution say they are hard-pressed to organize such unified endeavors.

They struggle to find funding, to fill chairs at events, or to gain the ear of congregations.

Rupert Shortt, Religion Editor at the Times Literary Supplement and author of Christianophobia (Rider, 2012) says:  ‘It’s true.  Christianity is by definition more quiescent, self-critical, more likely to reach out to the unreconciled other.  It’s a worthy reflection of Christian teaching, but also both liberal guilt shading into liberal blind spot.’

Grassroots

Fifteen years ago, a small group of influential American and British Christian leaders formed a robust movement to defend religious freedom abroad – but it is struggling to keep up momentum even as worldwide violence increases.

Nina Shea, Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, says their efforts ‘lit a prairie fire of grassroots activism’.

It resulted in some significant achievements: the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, which institutionalized regular reporting by the US State Department on religious persecution abroad; a US-brokered end to a genocidal religious conflict in South Sudan where some two million Christians and traditional African believers had already been killed; and South Sudan’s eventual independence from its persecutors in Khartoum.

‘Since then, these Christian leaders have passed away, retired or moved on to other interests and the movement has suffered.

‘Those non-church groups who remain engaged in defending against the mounting crisis of religious persecution internationally, such as ours, are under-funded and under-staffed.’

Shortt believes the sense that Christianity is a western religion and historically did the persecuting is partly to blame, together with a lack in the West of a sense of ethno-religious solidarity.

‘Whereas in fact Christians are persecuted more than any other faith community.

‘There is no community of Christians between Tunisia and Pakistan that is free from threat.’

Global anti-Christian persecution is a formidable challenge, threatening millions of lives on many fronts.

Christians can learn from the experience of world Jewry: to unite despite denominational differences, to inform themselves, seek solutions and speak with one clear voice on behalf of those who suffer.

 

Lela Gilbert is a journalist and author of Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner (Encounter, 2012). She is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and lives in Jerusalem and Southern California.

Persecuted: the Global Assault on Christians by Paul Marshall, Nina Shea and Lela Gilbert is published by Thomas Nelson and launched in March 2013.  It is available from the usual online retailers.