Pilgrims’ progress

Two institutions, the unusual French baron who built them, and the extraordinary people running them.

By AVIVA BAR-AM
The view from the Notre Dame de Jerusalem Center rooftop. (photo credit: SHMUEL BAR-AM)
The view from the Notre Dame de Jerusalem Center rooftop.
(photo credit: SHMUEL BAR-AM)
In the spring of 1882, French Baron Amadeus Marie Paul de Piellat led the first penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was called the Grand Caravan de Mille: the Pilgrimage of the Thousand. Anxious to atone for their sins, 1,000 rich, devout French Catholics made the trip to the Holy City.
Unfortunately there were not yet suitable overnight accommodations in Jerusalem for such a large group.
So de Piellat pitched tents on land he owned just outside the Old City walls, next to the hospital he had founded a few years earlier. Which was lucky, for the wind that rocked their tents and the rain that leaked inside caused quite a few of them to become ill.
Just a few dozen meters away from their tent city, the French group viewed, with envy, Russian Orthodox pilgrims happily ensconced in brand new hostels.
Worse still, those lodgings offered an unobstructed view of the Old City.
As soon as the pilgrims returned to France, they took up a collection, and in 1884 construction began on the enormous Notre Dame Monastery and guest house situated next to the hospital. The French consul was present at the groundbreaking ceremonies, turning the project into a national enterprise – one that, coincidentally, blocked the Russian view. Called Notre Dame de France, this was the largest single building constructed in Jerusalem before World War I and could house 1,600 pilgrims in its 410 rooms.
This is the story of two magnificent Jerusalem institutions standing side by side, the unusual French baron who built them, and the extraordinary people running them today.
Our tale begins in 1852 with the birth of the baron. Along with the intense Christian education he received, de Piellat became enamored of – some say obsessed with – the Crusades and the people who led their exciting campaigns.
In 1874, after joining a Catholic religious order, de Piellat made his first pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was then that he visited Jerusalem’s only Catholic hospital, which consisted of three vastly overcrowded rooms in the Latin Patriarchate within the Old City walls. Appalled at its terrible conditions, he bought land on the spot where a Lazarist lepers’ hospital had operated in the 12th century. Coincidentally or not, this was the spot on which the Crusaders had camped in 1099 before breaching Jerusalem’s city wall.
L’Hôpital Français Saint-Louis (the St.
Louis French Hospital), designed in what architect David Kroyanker calls Baroque Renaissance style, was named for French King Louis IX. De Piellat himself decorated the interior walls of the French Hospital, covering the wards with brightly colored coats of arms belonging to Crusader families. Indeed, when he died in 1925 – at the hospital – de Piellat was deeply involved in restoring those earlier paintings, for the Turks who had been in control of the country before World War I had covered the crosses over with black paint.
Last year, a water pipe burst in the hospital storeroom, and during cleanup, the nuns discovered some hitherto unknown paintings of Crusaders by de Piellat. By chance, says hospital director Monika Duellmann, experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority happened to be in the building. Excited, they promptly dispatched an expert to explain the art of cleaning the walls without damaging the newly discovered decorations, which depicted Crusader towns in the Land of Israel.
Sister Monika, warm and full of humor, has been running the hospital for past 10 years. Born in Germany, she first came to Jerusalem to study theology at the Dormition Abbey in 1985. Then, having caught the Jerusalem Virus (“not the syndrome,” she laughs. “For that they would have put me away!”), she returned afterward to volunteer at the hospital as an aide.
In 1989, she decided to join the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition – the order, founded in France in 1832, that was entrusted with care of the hospital.
She later studied nursing in France and returned in 2000 as both nurse and nun.
While the hospital is famous in the Holy Land as a hospice for the terminally ill, that’s not how it started out. It was actually founded as a general hospital, with an operating theater and a maternity ward.
In 1948 it found itself on the extremely hostile border between Jordan and Israel. It stopped taking in patients, who, for a short time, were rerouted to St. Peter’s Church on Mount Zion.
In the early 1950s, when Jerusalem suffered from a severe lack of facilities for cancer patients, the French Hospital reopened as an oncological facility and the first – and only – Catholic monastery in the world with a kosher kitchen and a rabbi. Later, patients would leave the French Hospital for treatment at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem in the morning, and return in the afternoon.
After Hadassah opened an oncology department, the only cancer patients to reach the French Hospital were those who needed palliative care. And so the French Hospital became the country’s first hospice for terminal patients.
Later, in addition to people suffering from cancer, the French Hospital began taking patients who were terminally ill. But there was a problem: Some of the patients continued to live. So today, the hospital contains three wards: oncology, complex nursing care, and a residence for former terminal patients whose families want them to continue getting the kind of care they have always enjoyed.
Unless mass is taking place, visitors are welcome in the curiously decorated chapel. St. Francis is pictured in one of the windows; a bullet passed through his hat during the War of Independence in 1948. And until the adjacent storeroom becomes a sitting room for the staff, visitors can enter for a look at the baron’s paintings of Crusaders.
Sister Monika stresses that patients “don’t come here to die, but to live until they are dead.” So patients are taken out to museums, to festivals, for walks in the city.
“If they don’t need oxygen, they go out,” she says.
“Even people in a coma, pushed in a wheelchair. And the reaction of the public has been very positive – they stop to watch us sing and dance, and we invite them to join in!” The hospital is well-connected to the community, which helps the patients feel integrated into society.
On Fridays, for example, the “Shabbat Ladies” from Mea She’arim bring home-baked cakes to the patients; children belonging to the Bnei Akiva youth movement come often to sing.
Because they are united by a common bond of suffering, the people who come together at the French Hospital get to know each other on common ground.
And with Jewish, Christian and Muslim holidays to celebrate, parties are frequent. Sometimes the result is rather unusual: Every December, for example, patients and their families enjoy klezmer music played between the hanukkia and the Christmas tree.
Any time is a good time for a party, says Sister Monika. One recent event was for a man with little time left to live. When the music began playing, he used his last strength to get up from his wheelchair, and his wife held him as the two danced together. The patient died two days later, leaving behind a wonderful memory and pictures showing the love that beamed on their faces.
BARON DE Piellat’s second project was the splendid Notre Dame de France, today known as the Notre Dame de Jerusalem Center. Adjacent to the hospital, it is one of the most magnificent structures in the city.
Tall, charming Father Eamon Kelly, who is in charge of guest relations, receives visitors to Notre Dame with a big, welcoming smile.
“Tourists can be apprehensive about coming to the Holy City,” he says. “They worry about the tension they have heard about in the news, and are also anxious that in this place where ‘God got involved,’ they might have some surprises in store.”
Kelly continues to smile as he strolls through the restaurants and the lobby, effectively cutting through the inevitable distance between priest and visitor.
And he smiles at everyone he passes on the streets of Jerusalem, as well. Why? “Because they all have such serious faces. Of course, there is a reason behind it, there is a history here, and I think Jerusalem needs some smiles, some heartwarming.”
Born on an Irish farm with no electricity or telephone and located over a kilometer away from the nearest house, Kelly would cycle five kilometers to school each day from the age of six.
“When they finally paved a road, I had to be careful – in a month, as many as three cars might pass me by!” he jests.
A chance lecture in high school by a priest from the Mexican-based Legionaries of Christ captured his imagination, and Kelly eventually joined the order.
Following his ordination, he was sent to Germany and Austria, finally landing in New York. He was there, and intimately involved, during the events of September 11, 2001.
In 2004, headed by Father Juan Solana, the Legionaries of Christ took over the pastoral care of Notre Dame de Jerusalem; Kelly arrived as second-in-command two years later.
Exuding a warmth that seems to envelop everyone around him, Kelly finds the human experience in Jerusalem as rich as any in the world.
“Of course, you could say that about New York and other cities,” he adds. “But here there is a spiritual intensity as well.”
He also finds that the Holy Land is the perfect venue for a priest.
“Working with indifferent Christians is hard, for modern society has an invisible bulletproof shell that can be difficult to penetrate,” he reflects. “But when even the most hardened, secular Christian comes here and sees that the Sea of Galilee is not a myth, and they climb the Mount of Olives, visit the cave in Bethlehem, tour Nazareth and Jerusalem – their protective superstructure melts. This is one of the gifts of this place, for you don’t go to the people – they come to you asking questions, seeking. It may not produce a major change in their belief structures, but something opens up.”
This, he explains, is the essence of Notre Dame, which acts as a nerve center and a resource for pilgrimage.
“Often I tell incoming groups that we want them to enjoy two things at Notre Dame: a good meal and a good sleep,” he says. “Nobody ever complains that there isn’t a television in his room, for visitors to the Holy Land are not on vacation. Their hearts and souls are so full that they don’t need entertainment. It would be like eating potato chips after a great meal – you just don’t want them.”
Some of the center’s Shabbat guests are Jewish, he continues. “I say, ‘Shabbat shalom,’ and they are kind of taken aback, but pleased. I ask them to help me with a little Hebrew – and I take out my Old Testament and they help me to read a psalm. Now, at least, these nonreligious Jews are doing something they might never do on Shabbat: reading a psalm!”


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