Foreign Minister Eli Cohen spoke with his Vatican counterpart Archbishop Paul Gallagher on Thursday, and condemned the “ugly phenomenon” where some Orthodox Jews have been filmed spitting on Christians in Jerusalem.
Cohen also condemned any harm to people based on their faith.
“This does not represent Jewish values and the widespread
condemnation of this despicable phenomenon is a testament to this fact,”
said Cohen in a statement following the phone call.
“Freedom of speech and worship are foundational principles in Israel,” said Cohen, “and the hundreds of thousands of Christian tourists who come to Israel every year to visit places that are holy to them and to us are wanted here, and will be welcomed with respect and with blessings.”
The two diplomats also spoke about the possibility of a visit by Gallagher to Israel, which would be the first bilateral visit by a Vatican secretary responsible for relations with states.
According to the Foreign Ministry, Cohen also used the call to note the anointment of Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, as a cardinal last month, saying that it shows the importance of Jerusalem to all the Abrahamic faiths.
Cohen and Gallagher last met in July in Vatican City.
The call on Thursday comes after a wave of public outcry against repeated incidents of Orthodox Jews spitting toward Christian worshippers in the Old City of Jerusalem this week.
In separate incidents on Monday and Wednesday, several people, including children, were seen spitting at Christian pilgrims and Christian institutions during a holiday procession in the Old City.
Five people were arrested on Friday over the incidents.
The episodes were widely condemned by political and religious figures in Israel, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it “sacrilege and simply unacceptable,” Chief Rabbi David Lau, who said it is “unwarranted” and Tourism Minister Haim Katz, who labeled it “pathetic.”
On Friday, US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt said the US decried “the recent incident in Jerusalem’s Old City in which a group of Jews who were observing Sukkot spat at Christian pilgrims and sites. Had the roles been reversed, we would have no trouble describing their behavior as antisemitic.”
“We commend Israeli law enforcement for their swift action in identifying and apprehending the culprits,” she tweeted.
Christian officials in Israel have lamented in recent months a rise in hostility and attacks against them, notably from Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox extremists.
In April, Pizzaballa said that “the frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new” under the religious, right-wing government sworn in late last year.
“These people feel they are protected… that the cultural and political atmosphere now can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.”
In August, President Isaac Herzog met with Christian leaders in Haifa to condemn the rising tide of violence, lamenting the “extremely serious phenomena in the treatment of members of Christian communities in the Holy Land, our brothers and sisters, Christian citizens, who feel attacked in their places of prayer and their cemeteries, on the street.”
In March, a resident of southern Israel was arrested after attacking priests with an iron bar at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in Gethsemane.
In January, a gang of religious Jewish teens threw chairs at an Armenian restaurant inside the city’s New Gate. Vandalism at the Church of the Flagellation in Jerusalem occurred the very next week by an American Jewish tourist.
An array of similar spitting incidents were also recorded in April.
In July, authorities apologized after a Christian abbot was asked by an official at Jerusalem’s Western Wall to hide his cross while accompanying Germany’s education minister to the holy site.
For months, a group of Haredi Jews have been holding prayer services outside the Stella Maris church, in what Christian worshippers have denounced as an attempt to intimidate them, leading to several scuffles between the groups.