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ncregister.com
By
PETER JESSERER SMITH 04/27/2016
WASHINGTON
— The genocide carried out by the Islamic State group (ISIS) has sought to wipe
out the Christian peoples of Syria and Iraq from their ancient homelands, but
also out to destroy the historical identity of the survivors.
Hundreds
of ancient Christian monasteries, churches and cemeteries have been leveled,
and countless manuscripts burned and lost to future generations. Even as it
loses its grip on territory with battlefield loses, ISIS has committed
military-grade munitions and bulldozers to destroy ancient Assyrian sites as
Nineveh, or demolish the famous ruins of Palmyra, once the center of an
Aramaean empire that challenged Rome.
But
while the miracle
of 3-D printing gives hope that even these artifacts, such as Palmyra’s
Arch of Triumph or Nineveh’s famous lamassu (huge granite winged bulls), may be
restored from the shards and pulverized dust of their originals, the Bible’s
most ancient living witnesses — the Aramaic and Assyrian peoples — are
completely irreplaceable and their survival is a matter of grave urgency.
“We
are a people on the brink of extinction,” Juliana Taimoorazy, a Chaldean
Catholic and ethnic Assyrian, told the Register.
Taimoorazy,
the executive director and founder of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council,
said Assyrians in Syria and Iraq are caught on the one hand between ethnic and
religious cleansing in their ancestral lands by Islamic militants, and
assimilation into the West on the other if they are extracted from their
homelands and not given the tools they need to sustain their language, culture,
and identity.
“We
gave a lot to Christianity as Eastern Christians, and we gave a lot to humanity
as the Assyrian people: our history is 6,700 years old, and we established the
first library in the world among other contributions,” she said. After the
Assyrians received the Gospel from St. Thomas the Apostle, they spread it as
far as India and China.
Cardinal
Dolan
The
sustained presence of these Assyrian and Aramaean Christians, both
Aramaic-speaking peoples with ancient histories, in their ancestral lands of
Syria and Iraq is also essential for the identity of the entire Catholic
Church.
“We
need them for our roots,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, told the Register
in
an interview after returning from visiting the Church in Erbil, Iraqi
Kurdistan, where more than 100,000 Christians expelled from the Nineveh Plain
by ISIS have taken refuge. He explained that it was imperative for the Church
in America and the West to be invested in their survival, by having their
parishes pray for them daily and stepping up their advocacy and material
support. If the Church fails to take care of them, he warned, “they will
despair and leave.”
“These
are our roots, and we see them displaced, see them threatened and see them
wondering about their very survival,” he said, adding that the Christians were
heavily dependent on support from Catholic agencies as Catholic Relief Services, Aid to the Church in Need, and the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.
Creating
a Safe Haven
Taimoorazy
said the Assyrians need to “a serious presence” in their ancestral homeland of
the Nineveh Plain of Iraq in order to survive as a nation with their language
and culture.
“All
these Christians, these Assyrians say, we will go back to our homes if we’re
protected by international forces and if we’re protected by our own people,”
she said.
Building
a safe and secure home for Iraq’s Christians is at last starting to make its
first real steps toward a concrete reality. Rob Nicholson, executive director
of the Philos Project, a non-profit
dedicated to promoting positive Christian involvement in the Middle East, said
he is working on completing a “white paper” by the end of May that would
finally provide a blueprint for State Department officials and Capitol Hill
lawmakers explaining step-by-step how to turn this safe haven into a concrete
reality.
“We
need to make the idea credible and tangible in those circles that matter,” he
said.
The
idea is that a plan for this minority province situated in the Nineveh Plain
for all the “Suryaya” — a name that encompasses ethnic Assyrian and Aramean
Christian peoples — can be put into action swiftly after ISIS falls.
For
the safe haven to be a reality, Nicholson pointed out that it requires a
diaspora community to make a conscious effort to pass on its language,
traditions, culture, and memory to the next generations.
“There
has to be a vision of returning,” he said. In this regard, the Jews have
provided useful lessons for how a diaspora community can be uprooted from its
homeland for nearly 2,000 years and eventually return. He noted that Jews every
Passover say “next year in Jerusalem” and this helps keep their identity alive.
“We
need to have a ‘next year in Nineveh’ for the Assyrian people,” he said.
Encouraging the Diaspora Communities
While
other diaspora communities as the Chaldean Catholic churches are more
established in the U.S. due to a spread of 30 years of immigration, the tasks
are daunting for many of the Syriac Catholics that were driven from Iraq and
Syria by ISIS and other Islamist militants.
“We
have come here as broken pieces,” Bishop Yousif Habash, who leads the Syriac Catholic Eparchy of Our
Lady of Deliverance in Newark, N.J., told the Register.
“People
are making real efforts to sustain our history, language, and liturgy,” he
said. “We are making marvelous efforts to survive.”
The
Syriac Catholic Church is one of the Eastern Churches formed from Christians
that descend from the Aramean tribes that once spread throughout the fertile
crescent of Mesopotamia, and concentrated in Aram (modern-day Syria), overlapping
with the Assyrians. The Syriac Church itself was also very close to the Jewish
Church in Jerusalem, celebrating the Liturgy of St. James the Just, the apostle
who was martyred around 65 A.D.
Bishop
Habash explained that St. Peter founded their church in Antioch, and said that
according to the Syriac tradition Jesus corresponded with the Aramean King
Agbar V of Edessa, and sent the king a portrait of his face miraculously
impressed on a cloth.
Bishop
Habash praised the U.S. bishops for giving Syriac Catholics and diaspora
Christians such warm welcome. But he said that the big challenge that they face
in sustaining their communities physically and spiritually, to “keep them under
the tent of the Syriac Catholic Church,” is a serious lack of resources.
Because
so many were fleeing persecution, they left behind the money and property
needed build their churches and a new life in the U.S.
“We
are here to stand and give witness for the Christian faith,” he said. “We told
ISIS, ‘You can take everything, but not our faith.’”
What
they have been able to accomplish so far, he said, has been due to the heroic
sacrifices of its people, who are still looking for jobs to support their
families, and learning the language and customs of the U.S., as well as from
some generous benefactors who choose to remain anonymous.
The
bishop is hopeful that more dioceses will come forward with closed churches
that they can make use of, and he is hoping to see the creation of a center for
teaching and promoting the ancient Aramaic language.
“We
need the help of others — the openness of others — to build a joyful world, a
joyful life here.”
Symbol
of Hope
The
focus of the Christians of Syria and Iraq right now is survival.
“Restoring
the people is the most important thing right now,” Taimoorazy said. “Restore
these people’s spirit, and then comes the rebuilding.”
For
the beleaguered Christians, there are signs and wonders amid the destruction of
ISIS that give hope: Amid the bulldozed remains of the ancient Syriac Catholic
monastery of Mar Elian, the bones of the third-century martyr St. Elian were discovered
intact, and not destroyed as feared.
Taimoorazy
also said that something remarkable happened with the tomb of Jonah. When ISIS
destroyed the Shiite mosque, it revealed the tower of the church, which had
been built to honor the prophet and buried beneath the mosque for nearly 800
years — a unique sign of Jonah.
She
said, “That is a symbol of hope that the Church can live on — if there are
people there who will go on building.”
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