Family man, not elves, behind Christmas treasures in Bethlehem
BEIT SAHOUR — Pilgrims and tourists buy souvenirs to remember their visit to the Holy Land, but for Ghassan Qumsieh, the trinkets are his form of survival.
Qumsieh, born in Palestine, got up from the dinner table eager to show his family’s guests – us, two Americans, and our teacher, Professor Haroon Moghul – his creation.
“One minute, one minute,” he said in English slowly. Qumsieh walked across the kitchen and retrieved a miniature nativity scene from a shelf. He placed it near our dinner plates, which were now cleaned after a few helpings of makloubeh, a dish of rice with cauliflower and potatoes, served with chicken and a side of yogurt.
Qumsieh, an Orthodox Catholic, takes pride in his craft. He proudly presented one of his nativity pieces – complete with baby Jesus and wise men figurines. Using various motions like a game of Charades, and the English he knows, he explained how he carefully cut the pieces and glued them together to create tourist treasures. He twisted the star at the top of the wooden barn site and a slow melody began to play.
Qumsieh’s days begin early and end late. After an 11-hour workday at his shop, he will sometimes come home, take a quick nap, and work on various trinkets until 1 a.m. This time of the year, with Easter approaching, the job is more arduous, as more tourists and pilgrims visit Bethlehem. But more business, more money.
“Life here is very expensive,” he told us.
His earnings support the home he bought about a decade ago – a modest but cozy three-bedroom fifth-floor unit in Beit Sahour, a little town outside of Bethlehem. The living room is adorned with Christian memorabilia, like a larger-than-life rosary tucked behind a family photo, an assortment of plants, and a picture of Jesus. The coffee table is lined with charms from his workshop, packaged and ready for the Easter crowds. On the kitchen counter sits a large box of wooden crosses and accessories yet to be glued together. “I’m very happy here,” he tells us.
It wasn’t an easy journey. Qumsieh was forced to leave the country for Jordan after the Six-Day War in 1967. He worked day and night at a minimart to start a new life only to repeat the process after his father died and he returned to the West Bank.
But his tenacity has paid off, a fact that’s apparent by interacting with his daughters – two confident and ambitious teens, who served both as hosts and, after Professor Moghul departed, our translators for the rest of evening when their parents’ English failed. Siwar is a boisterous and confident 14-year-old, who enjoys cooking – a skill she learned from watching “Top Chef” on television. “I want to be a chef,” she says, briefly glancing up from her cell phone. Her older sister, Nadine, 18, graduates this year from high school. Thanks to the hard work by Qumsieh and his wife, Rula, a history teacher, Nadine will go on to college, where she plans to study hotel management.
His fatherly instincts transferred over to his houseguests, too. “You’re my daughters, too,” he told us. When we left the next morning, he gifted us each with two of his Christian ornaments. As he plucked them in our hands, he smiled and said, “So you will remember me.”
The Holy Land is like a chessboard – it needs two players
NAZARETH — At 11:45 this morning, the muezzin called out the Muslim call to prayer in this city holy to Christians but populated overwhelmingly by Muslims. Just a few minutes later, as Muslim men lined up for prayer at the White Mosque, the bells in the tower of the Church of the Annunciation pealed loudly. It was a reminder of the tension between the faiths of this land, each of them vying for space, time and even the airwaves.
But one religious leader we met with today said that the conflict is not about religion.
“The conflict between Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druzes in the Holy Land is not really based on religion,” said Bishop Hanna Kildani, the new Latin patriarch for Nazareth. “The problem is the ground – to whom [does] the land [belong to]? When you play chess with someone, you need at least two players.”
Kildani was born in 1955 in Jordan and earned a Ph.D. in history from Saint Joseph Jesuit University in Beirut. In his view, religions should stop fighting about the land. Jerusalem, he said, is the one capital in the world that is accountable solely to the Lord and should therefore belong to everyone.
We were greeted with warm hospitality in the bishop’s office, just a few steps away from the Church of the Annunciation. Catholics believe that it was on this spot that the Archangel Gabriel delivered the news to Mary that she would be pregnant with a son.
The courtyard of the Church of the Annunciation was adorned with beautifully rendered artistic depictions of Mary from around the world.
Despite the bishop’s words, religious conflict abounds here. Recently, the Muslim group petitioned unsuccessfully to build a mosque next to the tomb of Shihab’al-din, a Muslim holy man. However, an improvisational “protest mosque” still stands.
Back at the patriarchate, Kildani said that Christians, who represent only two percent of the Israeli population, should build bridges, rather than walls, to other communities and between other communities.
However, he says that many Christian and Palestinian Arabs feel frustrated and disillusioned. “We recognize the borders of 1948,” he said. “We recognize the state of Israel, but not the occupation.” Former Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been the embodiment for peace for him. Kildani said that he had tears in his eyes when this great statesman was assassinated. For him, Shimon Peres, the late president of Israel, had encapsulated the problem of the conflict of the land when he said that “we have a lot of history here in Israel, but very few geography.”
After we bade farewell to the bishop, we stopped for a quick lunch in the center of Nazareth before heading north to Mount Meron, the highest point in the land of Israel. Our bus made its way, first through gridlocked traffic and then a sprawling green countryside, to a trail that circled near the top of the mountain. We joined other hikers on a rocky and narrow path marked by white, blue and orange signs sprayed onto large rocks.
Professor Yarden took the lead. We made two stops along the way – one for a stunning scenic overlook with views of the Israeli city of Safed, and the other to talk about the religious significance of hiking in Israeli Jewish culture. Yarden explained that during the weeks around Passover, schools take students on nature hikes.
“Hiking the land and getting to know the land is part of the Israeli patriotic culture,” said Yarden. “To know the land is to take ownership of the land.” Early Zionists, who did not have strong connections to it, believed that hiking would help them reconnect to it. It helped them get to know the history of Israel, he said.
“Hiking the land was part of a civil religion, of a new Judaism – a secular one,” said Yarden. “But it brought the old devotion to a new object.” Indeed, we passed a group of about 50 students from Yeshiva Mevaseret who were hiking from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, while we ourselves were bypassed by a gaggle of young boys and girls.
Following the hike, we made our way down meandering roads toward Bet Jann where we met with Druze Sheikh Jamil Khatib. We drank tea and coffee in his living room before moving to his terrace, which overlooked the town of some 12,000 Israeli Druze citizens.
Khatib laid out a short history of the Druze and the centuries-long persecution they’ve endured that has pushed them to create private communities. Their house of prayer in Bet Jann is self-effacing, built in a non-descriptive area so that outsiders cannot recognize it. Khatib added that during prayer, men and women are separated, with men praying out loud while women do so silently.
The values and beliefs of the Druze community are important and need to be passed on to the people who understand them, said the sheikh, referring to the concept that outsiders aren’t allowed to join or even study the books of the community. Only Druze can learn and practice the faith and such an exclusion of others also prohibits intermarriage.
However, Khatib emphasized the Druze’s respect of other religions, saying that God created differences among us for a reason.
“Human diversity is just a reflection of the greatness of God,” said Khatib. “We all came from Adam and Eve and it is obviously God’s will and part of the plan.”
Following our conversation, the sheikh’s family brought in platters of home-cooked foods, including rice and lentil dishes, roasted carrots, a tart tomato and cucumber salad and stuffed grape leaves shaped like thick cigars. Khatib offered a Druze prayer to start the meal.
The meal concluded our third day in Israel with the sheikh’s words ringing in our ears as yet another lesson: “We should live in this world with an awareness that we’re temporary residents,” said Khatib. “We should try to improve but we should leave the world as good or better when we leave.”
Khatib said that we, as journalists, had a special responsibility to tell the story of the Druze in Israel. He noted that we came not just from New York but from around the world and he sent us off with wishes of good luck and success in our lives and work.
Photos from day 3:
