2. Brother D. believes that the contemporary Catholic Church, having broken with the Jewish tradition, has been severed from its roots and is in a diseased state.
3. Brother D. believes that this “disease” can be healed only by “de-Latinizing” the Church and inculturating Christianity into local cultures.
I drew his attention to the ecclesiastical discipline to which he is obliged to adhere in his service, about which he agreed with me only in part and stated that conducting services in Hebrew, something he is attempting to effect, does not contradict any church directives.
Not feeling sufficiently competent to reach any decision in this matter, I consider it my duty to convey to you the gist of our talk. I attach with this letter the primary document on the basis of which the present talk was conducted.
With profound respect
Brother N. Sarimente
Abbot of the Stella Maris Monastery
June 1964
Reverend Father,
I consider it a duty of my monastic obedience to tell you about impermissible things being said by our fellow monk, Brother Daniel Stein, which he has been indulging in for a long time in respect of the position of the Holy See.
In the past D. Stein has made statements saying he disagrees with the Church’s policy in the Middle East. He has declared that the Vatican not recognizing the State of Israel is a mistake and a continuation of the Church’s policy of anti-Semitism. He has allowed himself to make a number of specific statements condemning the position of Pope Pius XII during the years of Nazism and blaming him for not opposing, the extermination of the Jews during the war. He has also expressed himself to the effect that the Vatican is engaging in political intrigue in favor of the Arabs because it is afraid of the Arab world. Brother Daniel is a Jew and has pro-Israel views and I think that is because of his origins and that partly explains his position.
However, his comments on the most important event of recent times of the visit of His Holiness to the Middle East and His Holiness’s historic meeting with Israeli state leaders on the Jenin-Meggido highway amount to condemning the Church’s position, which I find very upsetting and which I cannot but bring to your attention. His views appear not altogether to correspond with the opinions accepted within our Order.
Brother Elijah
August 1964
L
ETTER TO THE
G
ENERAL OF THE
O
RDER OF
C
ARMELITES
F
ROM THE
P
RIOR OF THE
L
EBANESE
P
ROVINCE OF THE
O
RDER OF
B
AREFOOT
B
ROTHERS OF THE
M
OST
H
OLY
V
IRGIN
M
ARY OF
M
OUNT
C
ARMEL
Your Eminence, dear Brother General!
I am forwarding to you a number of documents relating to the presence and activities in the Stella Maris Monastery of the priest Daniel Stein. May you perhaps consider it expedient to forward these documents to the competent departments of the Roman Curia?
I had a talk with Father Stein and invited him to put in writing his views regarding the conducting of services in Hebrew. I do not presume to reach a decision without your recommendations.
Prior of the Lebanese Province of the Order of Barefoot Brothers of the Most Holy Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel
25. 1996, Galilee, Moshav Nof a-Galil
F
ROM A TAPE-RECORDED CONVERSATION BETWEEN
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN AND
A
VIGDOR
S
TEIN
CASSETTE 3
AVIGDOR. Well, Ewa, what can I tell you about Daniel’s life in the monastery? In the first place, I have never been there. You went there, you know better than I do how everything stands in that place.
EWA. I didn’t see much. They wouldn’t let me through the door. They don’t allow women in. They only once admitted Golda Meir. Nobody wanted to talk to me. They said the abbot wasn’t in, and his secretary, a Greek, didn’t speak English. He just waved his arms at me as if to say, “No, no!”
AVIGDOR. If you remind me, I will show you a letter I received from one of our friends in Akiva shortly after the war. I have kept it. It speaks about the beginning of his monastic life, back in Poland. Why did you not ask him about it?
EWA. At the time, he was asking me the questions. Anyway, we were talking about other matters.
AVIGDOR. That’s quite right, he did not like talking about himself. He was like a partisan: if he didn’t feel it was necessary to say something, he didn’t give anything away. Five years must have passed before I realized how difficult he was finding life in the monastery. A great deal depended on the abbot, you see. If the abbot was a tolerant, broad-minded person, sensible relations were possible, but abbots change. Every three years, I think it is. They changed many times during the years he lived at Stella Maris. Just short of forty years Daniel lived in that place.
One abbot, as I recall, positively hated him. I do not know what the other monks there do or how they live, but they all live in the monastery and hardly ever go outside. None of them can speak Hebrew. If one of the monks fell ill and had to go to hospital, Daniel always went along as the interpreter. Without him they could do nothing that involved the world outside. And then there was the car. You see, soon after he arrived he bought a motor scooter, a Vespa, and started haring all over the country. Then he bought a car. That was after he had started earning money as a tour guide.
First he had a completely beat up Mazda, then a little antediluvian Ford. You can imagine how I viewed all this from the wings. There were perhaps twelve or fifteen monks living there. Daniel would get up at four in the morning to pray. What the rest of them do I don’t know, I suppose they work in the orchard. There is a marvelous orchard there and a small vineyard. Daniel never worked in the orchard. He would leave after morning prayers. From the very beginning he became a kind of social worker. He was a priest only in name! You see, the truth of the matter is that he should have been a doctor or a teacher. He would have made a very good doctor. He was probably a good monk. Absolutely everything he did, he did honestly and conscientiously, but the local monks were a different kettle of fish. For them he was an outsider, in the first place because he was Jewish. There was one monk living there who would not even speak to him. He spent his whole life in the same monastery and to the day he died he never talked to Daniel. Daniel would laugh about it. He would take him to visit the doctor and the monk would say nothing and look away. It was a difficult situation for him. But you know what he was like. He never complained, only gently laughed at himself.
And what about his parish? What kind of parishioners did he have? They were adrift, people displaced from their homes, mostly Catholic women who had married Jews. Some were ill, some were crazy, with children who were completely disorientated. Please don’t think I don’t know how difficult it is for a non-Jew to live in Israel. It is extremely difficult. Before Daniel came, the priest was an Irishman and the parishioners just wanted to get rid of him because he was a real anti-Semite. All these local Catholic women were linked to Jews by ties of kinship. One of Daniel’s parishioners had saved her husband’s life. He had lived in a cellar for a year and a half and every night she brought him food, took away his chamber pot, all this under the nose of the Germans. And that priest told this extraordinarily brave woman, “You have just spawned a lot of Jewish brats!” In the end, the Irishman was transferred to a Greek island where nobody knew anything about Jews and everyone was happy. Daniel, though, was sent to Haifa, to the Catholics here. During his first years, he conducted the service in Polish, but then to the Poles were gradually added Hungarians, Russians, Romanians. He had all sorts, speaking all sorts of languages. All the new arrivals were learning Hebrew, finding out how to travel around, how much to pay for bread. Gradually their common language for communicating became Hebrew, and after a few years Daniel began conducting the service in Hebrew. Almost all his parishioners were penniless, incapable of real work, all having babies and living on social welfare.