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.
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 world's other major religions. Nostra Aetate, proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on Oct. 28, 1965, declared that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ "cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." It also rejected a deeply ingrained Catholic notion of Jews as "rejected or accursed by God."
"The document speaks more to the Christian communities where the Jewish people are minorities," Yacoub says, calling it "a tremendous shift" for Christians in in Europe, but of less importance in the Middle East. "For communities that lived in interreligious diversity, Nostra Aetate is a helper, but for something that was already there."
Na'ama Dafni, the rabbi who lit the candle with the priest, doesn't agree completely. She points out that many Israeli Jews, including her own forebears, have European ancestry.
"The lived experience of my family is the Holocaust, is the anti-Jewish sentiment of the Christian population in Europe. So, for Abouna Yousef Yacoub," she says, calling the priest by his Arabic honorific, "that's not part of his story, because he was here. But for my family, it is part of my story. Although my grandparents helped build this country."
The rabbi and priest are good friends and belong to an interfaith forum at Haifa University's Laboratory for Religious Studies. Shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, the forum brought together 20 religious leaders, says Uriel Simonsohn, a professor of early medieval Islamic history and cofounder of the Haifa laboratory and the Frieze Center for Shared Society. The meetings were held in secret because of the strong views around the Israel-Palestinian conflict and sensitivities some religious leaders felt around collaborating with those of other faiths.
Many were concerned that fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas could spark a repeat of the intercommunal violence between Arabs and Jews that erupted in Haifa and elsewhere in Israel two years earlier, he says, triggered by a previous outbreak of fighting in Gaza.
He recalls the rationale for bringing the leaders together: "You are religious leaders. Let's keep our city safe."
The city has remained largely peaceful since the war started, partly because of efforts like this, among other reasons.
The Haifa Religious Studies Laboratory now offers a graduate course in interfaith dialogue, with 12 students in the current cohort. In one seminar, the students look like a mini-parliament of religions. There's an imam with a skullcap, several Druze women wearing white headscarves, some Jews and a Catholic priest in a cassock.
Rev. Munier Mazzawi is one of the students taking the course. He heads the Greek Catholic Church in the town of Maghar, about 50 miles from Haifa in northern Israel. Although the town is majority-Druze, with virtually no Jews, he appreciates the chance to dive into the experience of Israel's majority religious group.
"I'm interested in learning more about the Jews, including [their history] in Europe with antisemitism and everything," he says. Although he speaks fluent Hebrew, he says he knew little about antisemitism in Europe or about the discrimination Jews historically faced in Arab countries.
Karen Levisohn teaches a class in the program on religious tourism and is writing her doctoral thesis on Christian tourism in Israel.
A secular Jew, she grew up in the Galilee, where Jesus spent much of his life. But she didn't think much about that until she left her job as a high-tech engineer to become a tour guide.
"And I was amazed to realize what goes around my house," she says, referring to sites in the Galilee near where she grew up, "and the beauty that you would see in Christianity that I was not aware, because what we learn in school is about the Crusaders and the Holocaust and things like that."
That's the context, she says, in which the words of the late Pope Francis were received by Israelis when he called for an investigation last year into whether Israel's military actions in Gaza constituted genocide. (His successor, Pope Leo XIV, has so far avoided calling Israel's actions in Gaza a genocide but voiced deep concerns about the situation).
Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, Yaron Sideman, responded that Israel was exercising its right to self-defense following what he called the "genocidal massacre" that Hamas carried out on Oct. 7, 2023. It was just one of the controversies that erupted during Francis' papacy, despite early signs that his papacy would be a time of increased Catholic-Jewish cooperation.
"The relations between Jews and Christians [are] so delicate you don't even need a match" to ignite a firestorm of controversy, Levisohn says.
But in a land rife with memories of persecution and conflict, there's a glimmer of hope when a rabbi joins a priest at a holiday celebration — as happened at Haifa's Maronite St. Louis the King Cathedral — and lights a candle while the priest declares: "Blessed be the peacemakers."
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