[ad_1]
TBILISI, Georgia (JTA) — A shofar blast, church bells and a Muslim name to prayer opened the Sunday service on the Peace Cathedral in Tbilisi, Georgia on a heat June day.
There was incense, ritual hearth and sermons from a rabbi, a pastor and an imam. The service closed with the inauguration of a Torah, simply arrived from Haifa, within the synagogue, one among three homes of worship underneath one roof in an idealistic, maybe quixotic experiment in interfaith cooperation.
That was the climax of a outstanding weekend for the nondescript former warehouse that now homes the Peace Cathedral. The primary providers have been held in each the mosque, Masjid as Salaam, and the synagogue, Beit Knesset HaShalom.
At a second of rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Georgia, the Peace Cathedral stands as an emblem of chance. Generally known as the Peace Undertaking, it’s Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili’s reply to a collection of antisemitic, anti-Muslim and homophobic incidents from 2013-2015 on this former Soviet republic.
Songulashvili, Metropolitan Bishop of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia and professor of comparative theology at Ilia State College in Tbilisi, calls it his means of “responding to ugliness with magnificence.” He has reworked his church right into a constructing housing worship areas for all three Abrahamic faiths. Along with the mosque, synagogue and church, there’s a house for interfaith dialogue, in addition to an interfaith library for youngsters and adults.
“By way of our fellowship…it’s my hope that we are going to study from one another’s non secular experiences as we push one another to broaden our understanding of being human, being believers, and being members of this high-quality planet,” Songulashvili mentioned.
On the similar time, it’s offering an area for Tbilisi’s fledgling liberal Jewish neighborhood.
“It’s actually exhausting right here to search out one thing in case you are desirous about Judaism, aside from Chabad and the [Orthodox] synagogues,” mentioned Veronika Ferdman, who’s concerned in a wide range of Jewish organizations in Tbilisi, the place she is a scholar.
Rabbi Golan Ben-Chorin and Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili embrace within the Peace Cathedral. (Nano Saralishvili)
The Jewish neighborhood in Georgia dates again 2,600 years. Wealthy and layered, it’s at present fractured and dwindling, as Jews have emigrated in waves to Israel because the Seventies. Though the Jewish inhabitants as soon as numbered 80,000, with 5 synagogues in Tbilisi alone, there are actually about 3,000 Jews left in Georgia, and the synagogue neighborhood is more and more frail and aged.
The rising non-Orthodox neighborhood, led by younger Georgians and a few expatriates from England and america, has not been accepted by the 2 remaining Orthodox congregations or the native Chabad — the outpost of the worldwide Hasidic motion. The Orthodox neighborhood didn’t take part within the inauguration of the Peace Cathedral Torah and has not engaged with Songulashvili’s work.
On the crossroads of Europe and Asia, bordered by the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, Georgia has withstood fixed risk of invasion for its strategic location by Mongols, Ottomans, Persians, Russians and others. Like Ukraine, Georgia has European Union and NATO aspirations, and it’s watching Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with trepidation.
In response to standard perception, Jews arrived in Georgia within the sixth century BCE, after the autumn of the primary temple. Jews determine prominently within the Georgian Orthodox church’s founding legend, which facilities on the arrival of Christianity to the area by a Jewish girl. Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, they’re proudly Georgian, with their very own traditions and customs. Sephardic influences arrived a lot later, by the Ottoman Empire within the seventeenth century, and Ashkenazi Jews from Russia got here solely within the nineteenth century.
Clergy from the Peace Cathedral and its inspirations, together with the Home of One in Berlin, seen outdoors the complicated in Tbilisi. (Nano Saralishvili)
Georgians take pleasure of their embrace of the nation’s Jewish neighborhood and have a good time a historical past notable for its absence of ugly outbursts of antisemitic violence which are widespread within the area. However Ran Gidor, whose time period because the Israeli ambassador to Georgia ended at the start of July, worries that rising antisemitism in Georgia might put an finish to the comfortable relationship Jews have shared with their neighbors.
In 2013, hooligans broke up a Hanukkah menorah lighting in a public sq.. Witnesses to a 2018 homicide of a Georgian Jewish human rights activist recall antisemitic slurs being shouted by the attackers. Jewish kids now not really feel snug strolling round carrying kippahs, he mentioned, and within the final two years, senior clergy within the Georgian Orthodox church – the nation’s dominant faith — have delivered what Gidor known as “blatantly antisemitic sermons” and uploaded them to YouTube.
Whereas he doesn’t suppose the issue is unmanageable in the meanwhile, “If the trajectory is sustained, then it will likely be a difficulty in 10 years’ time.”
Gidor has known as Songulashvili’s venture “courageous,” and through his tenure, the Israeli embassy has helped financially help the Peace Cathedral.
Established in 1867 because the First Baptist Church of Tbilisi, the Peace Cathedral serves because the mom church of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia. Below the management of Songulashvili, it has repeatedly taken unpopular stands in help of girls and oppressed minorities which have led to harassment and worse. He has ordained ladies to function deacons, ministers and bishops, and he has offered hospitality and refuge to Muslim communities. He additionally embraces the LGBTQ+ neighborhood in a rustic the place that help could be a demise sentence.
His views have come at a price. Songulashvili, as soon as archbishop of Georgia’s Baptist Church, was demoted in 2013 to Metropolitan Bishop of Tbilisi due to his stand towards homophobia and Islamophobia.
In his trademark sandals, with a protracted white beard and hair pulled again in a ponytail, the bishop bears a putting resemblance to Dumbledore, the avuncular wizard within the Harry Potter movies. He calls himself “loopy” for the positions he takes and seeks out like-minded “loopy folks.” He was thrilled to discover a pastor in Germany, Gregor Hohberg, who pioneered the same mannequin, referred to as The Home of One, in Berlin in 2011, with Muslim and Jewish companions.
The Peace Cathedral and the Home of One have been working carefully collectively: It was the Home of One which offered the Torah, introduced by Rabbi Golan Ben-Chorin, a Reform rabbi in Haifa who heads the Home of One’s Israel affiliate, known as the Backyard of One.
Folks collect on the inauguration of a Torah scroll on the Peace Cathedral in Tbilisi. (Nano Saralishvili)
“What we’re witnessing isn’t any easy act,” mentioned Ben-Chorin, referring to the Peace Cathedral throughout his sermon. “It’s a imaginative and prescient of a greater world.”
Lela Tsitsuashvili is amongst these working to protect Georgia’s Jewish legacy. A curator on the Nationwide Gallery in Tbilisi skilled on the Hermitage and a Georgian Jew raised through the Soviet period, she is distinctly certified for the job. She wrote her dissertation on the Jewish Georgian Shalom Kobashvili, a self-taught artist who painted reminiscences of the Jewish neighborhood from his childhood. Now, she is preserving what’s left.
She is one among six caretakers, or shamashim, of the Torah at Beit Knesset HaShalom within the Peace Cathedral. Collectively, they’re now working to jot down a constitution for the synagogue, figuring out how it will likely be used.
“It’s an unbelievable alternative to be a part of this miracle,” mentioned Tsitsuashvili, who additionally participated within the Havdalah service ending Shabbat the night time earlier than the Torah was inaugurated — the primary such service to be held within the synagogue. Her household attended Orthodox synagogues on holidays. “It’s a dream to be a part of such an uncommon mannequin.”
One other of the shamashim is Keti Chikviladze, who like many younger folks in Georgia misplaced her connection to her household’s Jewish traditions through the a long time of Soviet repression. Her maternal great-grandfather was a Georgian rabbi, however he and her nice grandmother died within the Holodomor, or Nice Famine, of the early Nineteen Thirties, a disaster engineered by Stalin. Chikviladze knew little about her previous till she participated in a Taglit-Birthright Israel journey and had her first style of Jewish customs, rituals and apply.
“It was like a wave hit me,” she mentioned.
At present, she is the director of Hillel Tbilisi and like Tsitsuashvili feels she has a mission within the Jewish neighborhood of Georgia. She plans to remain quite than transfer to Israel, as most of her Jewish friends are doing. Till the creation of the Peace Cathedral, the native chapter of Hillel Worldwide — which runs hubs for younger Jews at American universities and in cities all over the world — has been one of many few avenues of Jewish expression for many who won’t meet the definitions Jewish identification underneath the halacha, or Jewish regulation, adopted by the Orthodox congregations.
Per week earlier than the Torah arrived, a gaggle of scholars had gathered at Lake Lisi overlooking the capital. Rounds of khachapuri, a basic Georgian flaky pastry stuffed with cheese, was set out picnic model together with drinks. After some hanging out, they shaped a circle among the many bushes for a musical havdalah service, led by Keti and her husband, Misha Grishashvili, with their younger son and daughter in tow. They concluded, as Jews do all over the world, with greetings of Shavua Tov, “a great week,” sung in Hebrew, English and Georgian (“Ketili Kvira”) earlier than hurrying to their automobiles as storm clouds threatened.
Among the many college students was Ferdman, whose grandfather labored for the Jewish Company. She’s lively in lots of Jewish organizations, and hopes that an inflow of Jewish youth from Belarus and Ukraine – fleeing both warfare or Belarus’ authoritarian authorities — will assist the Georgian liberal Jewish neighborhood set up itself extra effectively. She plans to go to Israel, however thinks she’s going to ultimately come again to Georgia.
Veronika Ferdman with fellow Georgian Hillel members at Lake Lisi. (Johanna Ginsberg)
Ferdman is longing for however cautious of Songulashvili’s venture and worries about what it should do to the material of the native Jewish neighborhood. “We’ll see,” is all she would say.
Because the Sunday service within the church neared its conclusion, the doorways of the cathedral opened. The Torah was on a desk simply outdoors, underneath a prayer scarf held by the shamashim. Ben-Chorin chanted a number of verses, after which withdrew the scroll from its metallic Sephardic case. The shamashim carried the scroll in a procession by the church, previous the mosque and into the synagogue, whereas the case handed among the many broader neighborhood. For a few of the Christians and Muslims in attendance, it was the primary time they’d ever seen a Torah.
“This entire ceremony -— it was like a dream you wished to not awake [from]. It went on to the soul,” mentioned Mustafa Shahin, a Muslim Home of One supporter from Berlin who had by no means met a rabbi nor seen a Torah earlier than. “We’re seeing all of the completely different folks share the identical thought, Jews, Christians, and Muslims: peace.”
Ted Jonas, one of many shamashim, an expatriate from Atlanta, Georgia, finds the venture fascinating. “They’ve built-in or uncovered themselves to different religions and notice they don’t must be afraid,” he mentioned after the service.
Salome Kumalashvili, a younger Christian girl who attended the inauguration, mentioned of the Peace Cathedral, “I feel it’s superb that folks of various religions attempt to converse with one another and attempt to be pals.” However she acknowledged that Songulashvili is an outlier. “Effectively, Georgia is an Orthodox [Christian] nation, and for many Georgians it’s most likely unusual,” she mentioned. “However I discover it so variety.”
Even when parishioners fall away, Songulashvili will maintain onto his rules, and his data that “I’m not the one loopy particular person on the market.” He added, “I nonetheless place confidence in God and religion in humanity. With out these, I don’t suppose I may proceed to reside on this nation.”
[ad_2]
Source link
