Storefronts and billboards in Jish (“Gush Halav” in Hebrew) this week were
decked with snowmen, holly wreaths and inflatable Santa Clauses, bringing a dose
of Christmas cheer to this Upper Galilee village a few kilometers from the
Lebanon border.
The pine trees that dot the town and the whiff of
smoldering fireplaces completed the yuletide ambiance when
The Jerusalem Post
visited the village on Mount Merom, 13 km. north of Safed, last week.
RELATED:Lebanon bill would allow return of SLA exiles from Israel The Alawites and Israel The
town of around 3,000 is predominantly Maronite, with around 65 percent of the
population adhering to the branch of Eastern Catholicism and living in harmony,
residents say, with Muslim and Greek Catholic (Melkite) minorities.
Jish
has the largest Maronite population of in Israel, where around 7,000 live mostly
in Jish and the neighboring village of Ikrit, as well as in Nahariya, where
former members of the South Lebanese Army and their families (estimated to
number 2,000 to 2,500 people today) were relocated after the IDF withdrew from
Lebanon in 2000.
Like Israel’s other small, non-Jewish communities, the
Maronites of the Galilee are a population in flux, cut off from their brethren
in neighboring countries. They continue their assimilation into Israeli society
while trying to ensure that their customs carry on into the next
generation. Those in Jish are also waging an ongoing battle with
authorities to regain land near Kibbutz Bar’am, the one-time location of the
Maronite village of Kafr Bir’am. Today, around half of the Maronite residents of
Jish trace their heritage to Kafr Bir’am, residents say.
Father Bshara
Suleiman sat in a reception hall room at the St. Maroun Church on Wednesday, the
center of the Parish of St. Maroun, named after the 5th-century Syriac monk
whose followers founded the Maronite Church after his death in 410 CE. Today the
Maronite Church is subject to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and its
adherents number a little over 3 million, including more than 1 million in
Lebanon, where they make up nearly a quarter of the population, and were a
majority late into the second half of the 20th century.
“We began
construction on this church in 1981 and finished in 1996. Before then we had
just a small church of 100 [square] meters and now we have 1,000 meters here for
the young people and all of the activities of the parish,” Suleiman
said.
Suleiman said the project cost around $5 million, raised from
members of the parish both in Israel and abroad. The community has its own
bishop in Haifa, but up until 15 years ago it was under the bishop of Tyre in
Lebanon.
When asked about the connections Israel’s Maronite community has
with those in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, he said, “With those in
Syria we have no relations, in Jordan we can go there just like you, and in
Lebanon we could go until 10 years ago, when they closed the ‘Good Fence’ on the
border. We still have families there on the other side.”
It’s clear that
the Maronites of Jish view themselves as a distinct ethno-religious group,
apparently seeing themselves as neither Arab nor Palestinian, rather as Aramaic
or Maronite citizens of Israel.
According to Jish native Dr. Elias A. Suleiman, a lecturer
from Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies and supervisor
of Jish’s schools, the majority of Maronites “reject Arab identity in favor of a
distinct Maronite one... They live as citizens and will continue to live here,
and if the Palestinians establish their state, no Maronite from Israel will move
to live there.”
Suleiman said the Maronites are loyal, law-abiding
citizens of Israel who “did not deny the existence of the state and the fact
that Israel exists. They also do not forget that they are a minority with
problems that need solutions.”
He said Jish is regarded as “an old
village,” and that many of the young people make their way to Haifa and other
cities for university after high school. Keeping them in the village is in many
ways a losing battle, he said. The village is largely middle class, thick with
doctors and other professionals, an assertion that is easy to believe judging by
the expansive houses and late model cars cruising the streets.
Suleiman
spoke outside the parish’s former church, a small stone building that was
rebuilt from the ground up after it and the rest of the town was leveled in the
1837 Safed earthquake. The building is still used for some weekly services, but
the anchor of the community has long been the St. Maroun Church.
Inside
the old church, an elderly resident, Maron Alam, chanted prayers in Aramaic,
while standing next to a small Christmas tree. Words that sounded like
Hebrew or Arabic echoed off the low arched ceiling.
“It always gets to me
every time when I hear this. Because there are very few people today who
can say it. A people without their heritage cannot exist,” local activist
Shadi Khalloul of the Aramean Center said. For a moment his eyes appeared to
water in the cold stone church.
Khalloul is a linguistic and cultural
champion of sorts, heading up the teaching of Aramaic to the town’s youth and
acting as as an advocate on behalf of Maronite land claims in the Upper Galilee
before the Israeli authorities.
Khalloul, whose family hails from Kafr
Bir’am, and generations before that from Bcharre in Lebanon’s Kadisha Valley,
said teaching Aramaic is meant to strengthen the children’s connection to their
heritage and their identity as Maronites. He has been teaching Aramaic to the
children of Jish for three years, often using textbooks made in Lebanon and sent
to Israel through a third country such as Sweden, where a large population of
Maronites lives.
For Khalloul, this identity is critically linked not
only to Aramaic, but to the land on which Kafr Bir’am once stood. He says about
40% of the Maronite population of Jish are descendants of people relocated there
after War of Independence, when Israeli forces called on the villagers to
evacuate in order to clear a buffer zone on the border with Lebanon.
They
were never allowed to return, and they now seek the return of some of the 1,200
hectares (2,965 acres) in Kibbutz Ba’ram/Moshav Dovev to build a small
historical village for tourism, as well as a small village to house
Maronites.
Khalloul spoke while walking through the ruins of Kafr Bir’am
in Bar’am National Park, which there is a 4th-century synagogue that served the
Jewish village of Kfar Bar’am as well as the 17th-century Maronite church that
was the center of village life before the war. While the church appears
well preserved, all that remains of the village are low stone walls and a few
archways grown over with vegetation. The park lies next to a Maronite
cemetery, where Aramaic inscriptions are carved on the headstones and family
vaults.
He described a community that smuggled Jews to the pre-1948
yishuv, and has seen its contribution forgotten, with the people left unable to
recover lands they lost in the war.
“We helped Jews escape to Israel
through Lebanon when the British wouldn’t let them in. Some of these Jews would
sleep in our village at night until the bus would come the next day and take
them to Haifa. So in 1948 we didn’t run; most of those who ran were Muslims. We
didn’t run because we knew the people we were facing, so we stayed,” Khalloul
said.
“Instead of treating your allies well, you treated us like enemies.
We were not enemies, we were allies. We helped the Jews and we expected the same
treatment, and now we ask them to help us, allow us to go back and build the
village again,” Khalloul said, with the Lebanese border just a short walk past
his shoulder.