Standing up for Israel

Isn’t it time to put the past behind us? No! Israel is about more than the past. It also has a present and a future. During the Nazi dictatorship Mother Basilea had the courage to tell the Gestapo that according to God’s eternally valid Word, Israel, as God’s covenant people, have a great future.

Shock over the facts of the Holocaust brought the young community to repentance over what our people did to the Jews. Since these early beginnings, a major focus of our ministry has been reconciliation and healing of our relationship with Israel.

At some point in the mid fifties, Mother Basilea’s heart began to burn to do acts of kindness for Jewish people and so to help wounds to heal. Sisters of Mary travelled to Israel in 1957, where they served among Holocaust survivors – at first in the north of the country and later in Haifa. Mother Basilea’s eye-opening book, ISRAEL, MY CHOSEN PEOPLE, published in 1958, revealed nationwide the abyss of guilt, placing past events in the light of God’s truth. During the difficult months of the so-called “Auschwitz trials” (1963 – 1965), it was our privilege to offer Jewish witnesses hospitality and emotional support.

More sisters left the motherhouse in 1962, this time for the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem as it was then, where for many years they upheld a ministry of prayer. Living as they were in the midst of Arab families, gave them opportunity to build many warm relationships. In the forty years of ministry there, sisters were also able to guide countless pilgrim groups around the Holy Places. Throughout these years and since, the pamphlet, “Holy Places Today” was distributed in the hundreds of thousands in many languages at the sites where Jesus lived and suffered.

Jewish visitors can be sure of a warm welcome at Kanaan. Whether old or young, a rabbi from Israel or a bus group of the elderly from a Jewish nursing home in Germany, the gratitude they express for the few drops of love and comfort we give them puts us to shame.

For Christians from the nations, praying “Your kingdom come” means getting rid of the stones that litter the way and hinder Jews from seeing Jesus as their Messiah (see “Removing the Stones”). In the early days of the church, a disastrous heresy crept in leading to the first church division – to a separation from our Jewish roots as they are clearly outlined in the Bible.

We are grateful for every chance we still have to show Holocaust survivors that we care – for as long as they are among us – whether in Israel, here in Germany, or in countries where we have a branch. As Christians, we stand with the Jews, God’s covenant people, and our “elder brother”. We are against anti-Semitism in all its forms. We also stand with the State of Israel and the land which God promised the Jews and to which He has let them return.