Merry Christmas from Jerusalem

Jerusalem's lovely Lutheran Church of the Redeemer

Merry Christmas From Jerusalem  -Jeffrey Goldberg

Christmas Eve we headed to the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer [pictured above] in the Christian Quarter of the Old City [of Jerusalem] for a beautiful and slightly bizarre Christmas service.

Beautiful because the church is itself beautiful and because the service opens with a gorgeous candle-lighting ceremony and is lifted-up by a choir singing "Silent Night" in German.  [A]nd bizarre in a good way, because many of the visitors to the church last night were Israeli Jews, there to experience multicultural Jerusalem...

James Snyder, the director of the stunningly re-imagined and reinvigorated Israel Museum brought us to the service, and whispered to me that "the dirty little secret of Jerusalem is that it is a fully-functioning intercommunal city." I think this is true. Yes, there are terrifically difficult issues but this city is so much more complicated than news accounts would suggest.

Earlier yesterday, I took [my son] to a local medical clinic for a strep test. The clinic, called Terem, is well-known in Jerusalem in part because it was started by a physician named David Applebaum, who was killed in the September 9, 2003 terrorist bombing of a cafe in the Germany Colony neighborhood, along with his daughter Naava, who was scheduled to get married the next day.

The physician who saw my son at Terem, like many of the clinic's physicians, is an Arab from East Jerualem. In Terem, and at Hadassah Hospital, and the other hospitals in town, Jews treat Arabs, Arabs treat Jews, and no one thinks twice about it. No one who lives here, I mean.

For visitors these sorts of commonplace facts of life -- Germans praying in Hebrew, Arab physicians treating Jews in a clinic founded by a terror victim, and on, and on -- can be astonishing. Merry Christmas.
[The Atlantic]
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