Making amends

In response to Jewish extremism, rabbis raise money to rebuild torched Tabgha church

By GIL STERN STERN ZOHAR
Abbot Gregory Collins, head of the Order of St. Benedict in Israel, stands amid the damage. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Abbot Gregory Collins, head of the Order of St. Benedict in Israel, stands amid the damage.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Arguing that talk is cheap, a group of rabbis, together with Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, has raised more than NIS 65,000 toward repairing the damage to the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha.
The church, on the northwestern shore of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), was torched and desecrated by Jewish extremists on June 18. Hebrew graffiti spray-painted at the site, reading, “The worshipers of idols shall be destroyed,” was taken from the “ Aleinu” prayer. The desecration was one in a series of 17 “price-tag” graffiti attacks on Christian and Muslim holy sites across the country since 2011.
The group of rabbis had originally hoped to raise only NIS 50,000, but 419 donors filled the coffers of the fund-raising appeal, which ended August 6.
“Condemnation is not enough; after a while it loses its credibility,” says Alon Goshen-Gottstein, the director of the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute – a dialogue organization he founded in 1997. He convened a group of fellow Orthodox Zionist rabbis to launch a crowdfunding initiative to repair the damage that the arson caused to the lakeside landmark – one of the country’s most sacred and picturesque Roman Catholic shrines.
Goshen-Gottstein’s fund-raising appeal was endorsed by 17 leading rabbis, including Tzohar chairman David Stav, yeshiva leader Nahum Rabinovitch of Ma’aleh Adumim, Efrat Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, and former Bayit Yehudi party leader and current Bar-Ilan University president Daniel Herschkowitz.
“We are fighting for the heart and image of Judaism, and for our own heart and image,” the group stated. “In this battle we are receiving increasing support from rabbinic leadership that believes that the torching of Tabgha church (and of other churches and mosques) is a desecration of the divine name. We must respond with acts of kiddush Hashem [sanctification of God’s name].”
The funds from the crowdfunding initiative will be used to repair the church’s roof, which was fire-damaged in the attack. There was also damage to a book-storage room, offices, and an event hall; the church’s sanctuary was spared.
On July 12, investigators in a joint operation of the Israel Police’s National Crime Unit and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) arrested Yinon Reuveni, 20, of Ofakim; Yehuda Asraf, 19, of Elad; Mordechai Meyer, 18, of Ma’aleh Adumim; Moshe Orbach, 24, of Bnei Brak; and an unnamed 17-year-old from Ramle as suspects in the arson cell. Sixteen individuals – apparently all Jews from Samaria – were arrested but later released without charge.
The Church  of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, often abbreviated as the Church of the Multiplication, marks the traditional site where, according to all four Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus fed a crowd of 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish, and had food left over.
The adjoining Church of Peter’s Pri macy marks the meal they shared there. Three kilometers north along the lake shore are the remains of the fishing village of Capernaum, where Jesus lived during his ministry in the Galilee. On a hill above Tabgha is the Mount of Beatitudes, where he delivered his Sermon on the Mount. The crisscrossing Gospel Trail and Jesus Trail link the sites associated with Jesus, from Nazareth – where he grew up – to the Kinneret.
Built in the mid-third century, the Church of the Multiplication was already a well-known pilgrimage site by the early Byzantine period. It was expanded in the fifth century, but the Persians destroyed it when they ransacked the Land of Israel in 614.
The Byzantine structures and mosaics from the original church were first documented in 1889 by the German-American explorer Gottlieb Schumacher. But it was only in 1980 that German Benedictine monks laid the cornerstone for the present church, which is similar to the Byzantine building. A pool with Japanese koi symbolizes the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Inaugurated and consecrated in 1982, the church and adjoining monastery were expanded in 2012 to include a pilgrim guest house.
Those pilgrims come to see Tabgha’s famous mosaic – arguably the most photographed in the Holy Land – depicting the basket of loaves and the two fish. (The basket in the mosaic actually contains only four loaves. One explanation is that the fifth loaf is represented by the communion in the church itself, so that worshipers actively participate in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand.) “The church is visited daily by 5,000 people, making this act of vandalism the most visible to date in a series of attacks on religious sites of other religions,” the rabbis said in their statement. “The accompanying graffiti appealed to texts from the Jewish prayer book, making it an attack on explicitly religious grounds.”
They declared that “the burning of the Tabgha church has brought religiously based hatred to new heights. This is the first time that Jews [have burned] a church with a religious text as support. We cannot remain silent in the face of such a show of hatred in the name of religion. We must show the world, those who were injured and, above all, ourselves that the Judaism of hate is not our Judaism. Our Judaism builds; it does not destroy. [Hassidic master] Rabbi Nahman of Breslov taught: If you believe you can destroy, believe you can repair. We must deliver a message of repair where others have delivered a message of hatred and destruction.”