Despite Vatican-Israel tensions, Catholics and Jews work to build trust in Haifa

Despite Vatican-Israel tensions, Catholics and Jews work to build trust in Haifa Rabbi Na'ama Dafni and Rev. Yousef Yacoub in Haifa, Israel. Jerome Socolovsky/NPR hide caption toggle caption HAIFA, Israel - St. Louis the King Cathedral is festooned with string lights for the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. The multitude pressed between the alabaster-like walls of the churchyard is so dense, it almost feels like every one of Haifa's estimated 4,000 Maronite Catholics is here. Before the lighting ceremony and the fireworks, the Rev. Yousef Yacoub invites a rabbi onstage. Yacoub stands beside Na'ama Dafni of Or Hadash, a Reform congregation, as she lights a blue-and-white braided candle and says a nondenominational prayer. "It is a great honor and privilege to be with you today, to kindle lights of hope, happiness, and with prayers for peaceful holidays, years of quiet and good neighborliness, that we may raise our boys and girls with safety and love," she tells the crowd. Yacoub invited the rabbi to join him at the Christmas celebration, he says, to show "that we are praying, both of us, for light and for peace and for happiness for people." Despite strained relations between the Vatican and Israel during the war in Gaza - with the late Pope Francis suggesting Israel may have committed genocide , something Israel vehemently denies - Catholic and Jewish leaders in Haifa, a city along the Mediterranean Sea in northern Israel, are trying to build trust between their communities, which live largely siloed from each other. It's part of an effort to forge interreligious understanding in an ancient port city with a very diverse landscape: In addition to its majority-Jewish population, there are many Christians here, including other Catholic denominations such as the Melkite Greek church, and significant communities of Muslims, Druze and Bahá'ís. St. Louis the King Cathedral in Haifa, Israel. Jerome Socolovsky/NPR hide caption toggle caption Many have histories of persecution and suffering. For Maronites, the persecution goes back more than one-and-a-half millennia and occurred under a succession of rulers in the Middle East, both Christian and Islamic. "There was violence, there was hatred and there were wars," says Yacoub. When this church was built in the late 19th century, it had French protection, because the Ottoman Empire limited the founding of new churches for local populations, he says. That's why it was named after the 13th century French crusader and saint, King Louis IX. The Maronite priest says Jews he meets here often think about Christians in the context of European antisemitism, such as Spain's expulsion of their ancestors in 1492. He tells them Christians in the Middle East have little or nothing to do with worst horrors of European history, and may not even be aware of them. "You might even find people who have no idea what happened in Spain," he says. This year is the 60th anniversary of a landmark Vatican declaration that renounced centuries of antisemitic theology and open the door for Catholics to cultivate relations with the...

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