Last June, Rabbi Charles Arian attended a conference on Dabru Emet in Jerusalem. He provides the following report on Israel's reaction to the groundbreaking statement initiated by the ICJS, which continues to be the focus of international discussion.

When I spent my junior year of college on the overseas student program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I realized one morning while taking a final exam that it was December 25. I looked around, realized that two or three of my American fellow-students were Christians, and wondered what it felt like for them to be taking an exam on Christmas day. Did that experience give them a greater insight about what American Jews feel as a small minority in a largely Chris-tian society?

Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Chris-tianity addresses the reality of American Jews. Jews in other countries face different situations. How well does Dabru Emet address the Israeli reality? Are Israelis ready and able to make the changes in their view of Christianity that Dabru Emet calls on Jews to make?

Three Israeli organizations -- the Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College, and the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University -- sponsored a conference on Dabru Emet on June 2 and 3, 2002, in Jerusalem. Participants included Rabbi Uri Regev, executive director of the World Union of Pro-gressive Judaism (which unites Reform, Reconstructionist, and Liberal Jewish communities throughout the world) and Rabbi Ehud Bandel, president of the Masorti (Conservative) move-ment in Israel. While there have been any number of conferences and programs about Dabru Emet since it first appeared, this was the first such conference conducted in Hebrew. To make that possible, Professor Yehoyada Amir of the Hebrew Union College prepared a Hebrew translation of the statement.

Rabbi Michael Signer, a professor at Notre Dame and one of the drafters of the statement, gave the keynote address at the opening public plenary. Rabbi Signer explained to his Israeli audience the origin of the statement, why the authors felt it was necessary, and some of the reactions that Dabru Emet received. Two theologians who live and work in Jerusalem responded to his talk. The first was Rabbi David Rosen, who is international director for interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee (and one of a small number of Orthodox rabbis who signed Dabru Emet). The Christian respondent was Father Michael McGarry, rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, which is located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

While the public session at Hebrew Union College served to introduce the Hebrew-speaking public to Dabru Emet, the invitation-only session the next day at the Hebrew University provided a great deal of fertile discussion. A number of the participants were Israelis involved in some way in various interfaith efforts currently taking place in Israel. Others were involved in Jewish education, since one of the agenda items for discussion was an assessment of what is currently being taught about Christianity and how it might be in need of change.

As an American rabbi who works in the field of Christian and Jewish Studies, I found the discussion to be fascinating. While there was general agreement that Dabru Emet is an important achievement, there were a couple of criticisms raised, which were, in my opinion, reflective of the vast differences between the Israeli and American contexts. It is to these criticisms that I want to turn my attention.

The first criticism raised by a number of Israelis is that Dabru Emet is "too religious." In other words, it portrays Judaism as a religion and presents an assessment of Christianity as another religion. Most Israeli Jews relate more to "Jewishness" (the cultural/ethnic phenomenon) rather than to "Judaism" (the religion) -- especially if they are not Orthodox, which few of the conference participants were. Because of the "religious" focus of the document, many conference participants felt that Dabru Emet did not adequately speak to their reality.

The observation about the religious nature of Dabru Emet is correct. Most of the Dabru Emet authors view the document as part of an attempt to reposition Jewish identity in America from ethnic to religious in nature. During the conference discussion, I said that I believe such a move is crucial in order for the American Jewish community to thrive. Ethnicity in America tends to break down, while religion has remarkable staying power. I added that an American Jew who strongly desires to remain Jewish but views his or her identity in national or ethnic terms should seriously consider moving to Israel -- a statement with which my Israeli audience, not surprisingly, mostly agreed.

But the Israeli context is different. Orthodox Israelis are largely indifferent if not actively hostile to other religions. Non-Orthodox Israelis are often indifferent or hostile to Jewish reli-gious concerns. An Israeli Jewish "statement on Christians and Christianity" will have to take these factors into consideration. The question of how an Israeli Jewish community that views its Jewishness as mostly national should relate to Christianity, which is much more clearly defined by religious belief, should prove fascinating.

It might at first glance appear surprising that a group of Israelis would be uncomfortable with Dabru Emet's statement that "Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the Land of Israel," but that was exactly the case. Much of that discomfort, I believe, stems from the difficulties that even the best translators have in conveying nuances of meaning from one language to the other. The Hebrew word "t’viah" was used to translate the English "claim," but it is a much stronger word, conveying something perhaps closer to the English word "demand." In addition, in the Israeli context "Eretz Yisrael," "Land of Israel," is often a buzzword implying support for Israel's permanent rule in the West Bank and Gaza and an opposition to any territorial compromise. Thus a state-ment, which in the American context was intended to acknowledge Christian recognition of the Jewish people's connection to Israel, was understood by many of the Israeli participants to convey support for one side in Israel's very heated debate over the future of the disputed territories.

One of the most fascinating speakers was the Rev. Samwil Fanous, an Anglican priest from Ramleh. Ramleh is a mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel, which means of course that the Arabs who live there are Israeli citizens. Rev. Fanous received his seminary training in Virginia and was then sent to minister to the Anglican community in Ramallah, in the West Bank. As an Israeli Palestinian, he found that he had many cultural differences with his West Bank Palestinian congregants.

Reverend Fanous is now serving in Ramleh, where he was born and raised. He described (quite movingly, in my opinion) his struggles in trying to teach his congregants to relate positively to the Jewish matrix in which Christianity arose, and to appreciate the continuing connections between Christianity and Judaism. This is not easy, of course, given that Israeli Christian Arabs also see themselves as a part of the larger Palestinian people. Reverend Fanous stated, "I am proud to be a part of Israel," and expressed his hope that an eventual peace would allow Israeli Christians to feel more fully identified with the state of which they are citizens.

Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, in his book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, said that his dialogue with Christianity (and Islam) was made possible by his status as part of a Jewish majority. Most of the Israeli participants reported a very different reality. Being a majority does not give them the freedom to encounter Christians without the fear and suspicion Diaspora Jews often have. Rather, it gives them the "freedom" to ignore Christians altogether, reasoning that as Jews in a Jewish state they have no need for the encounter and nothing to gain from it. The Jerusalem Dabru Emet conference served to open the question of a specifically "Israeli" Jewish view of Christianity, and there was a strong consensus that an Israeli counterpart to Dabru Emet was sorely needed. In serving as a catalyst to this discussion, the ICJS and our National Jewish Scholars Project have played a role in the effort to forge new relationships between Israeli Jews and Israeli Christians.