Before Oct. 7, 2023, Aviv Lapid described where she lived in Israel as being just a five-minute run from the Gaza Strip. Two years later, Lapid now refers to the space as “the distance between Hamas terrorists and my house.” Lapid told her story at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County on Oct. 5 during a commemoration ceremony marking two years since the Hamas attacks.
At one point during the synagogue hostage situation in Colleyville, Texas, on Jan. 15, interfaith leaders stationed at nearby Good Shepherd Catholic Community Church began discussing why bad things happen to good people.
Local religious, politicians, and community leaders met in Hollis Hills on Tuesday to denounce the desecration of a large menorah at the Chabad House of Eastern Queens during the start of Hanukkah.
When filmmaker Martin Doblmeier considers the interfaith growth between Catholics and Jews, Pope Francis’ October 2018 Angelus prayer for the 11 victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh comes to mind.
For many Catholics, making the transition from in-person to livestreamed Mass during the pandemic has been a sobering experience. It has meant not being able to receive the Eucharist and participate in Mass with the rest of the faithful. That’s not Debbie Starkman-Zdyrko’s experience. She feels closer to her community and the Catholic faith now than she did before quarantine began.
The formal structures that sponsor Catholic-Jewish dialogue are important, but their decades of success have relied on strong personal friendships and mutual respect, both of which must continue to spread among all Catholics and Jews, officials involved in the dialogue said.
In his first encyclical “Deus Caritas Est,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote that Christianity doesn’t begin with an idea or an ethical system, but an encounter with the person of Christ.
Gary Krupp, a co-founder of the Pave the Way Foundation, a Long Island-based organization that strives to promote understanding among people of different religions, says Pope Pius XII, did a lot to help Jewish people during World War II.
Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer organization known for patrolling New York City’s subways in the 1980s, never left the streets, but he and his group are back in a more prominent role, because of the spree of anti-Semitic crimes that have hit the area during the last month.
Pope Francis condemned the “barbaric resurgence” of anti-Semitism and criticized the selfish indifference that is creating the conditions for division, populism and hatred.
