They violate the injunction to follow the “pathways of peace,” …. and are liable to provoke anti-Semitism overseas.
Father Samuel Aghoyan, a senior Armenian Orthodox cleric in Jerusalem’s Old City, says he’s been spat at by young haredi and national Orthodox Jews “about 15 to 20 times” in the past decade. The last time it happened, he said, was earlier this month. “I was walking back from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and I saw this boy in a yarmulke and ritual fringes coming back from the Western Wall, and he spat at me two or three times.”
Wearing a dark-blue robe, sitting in St. James’s Church, the main Armenian church in the Old City, Aghoyan said, “Every single priest in this church has been spat on. It happens day and night.”
Father Athanasius, a Texas-born Franciscan monk who heads the Christian Information Center inside the Jaffa Gate, said he’s been spat at by haredi and national Orthodox Jews “about 15 times in the last six months” – not only in the Old City, but also on Rehov Agron near the Franciscan friary. “One time a bunch of kids spat at me, another time a little girl spat at me,” said the brown-robed monk near the Jaffa Gate.
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“I hate to say it, but we’ve grown accustomed tothis. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nunshas become a tradition,” said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini,sitting inside the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa.
These are the very opposite of isolated incidents. FatherAthanasius of the Christian Information Center called them a”phenomenon.” George Hintlian, the unofficial spokesman for the localArmenian community and former secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate,said it was “like a campaign.”