"Building on the Mount of Olives" The Lutheran magazine, May 2006

Family life centers around one room in Saleh and Sahar Kawas’ apartment in Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s where the 30-something couple and their five children eat, do homework, watch TV, play indoor basketball and sleep. Their cramped conditions illustrate a larger problem. Lutheran World Federation regional representative Mark Brown said affordable housing is hard to come by for Jerusalem’s Christian Palestinians. To help, the LWF plans to construct an 
$8-million Christian housing project on almost 4 acres on the Mount of Olives. more …

Presiding Bishop: "Church, find your voice" The Lutheran magazine, May 2006

"As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:41-42). Even as Jesus wept over Jerusalem centuries ago, the city today calls us to public lament. Weeping is not the only possible response to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict by U.S. Lutheran Christians. As we seek to sort out the tangled historical roots and ever-changing political dimensions of this strife, certainly there is something upon which we can agree. more …

"Only at Christmas" The Lutheran magazine, December 2005

Only at Christmastime is Jumana Khoury (name changed to protect the family), 25, not afraid to walk out the door of her home into Jerusalem’s Old City. Every time she leaves she risks being arrested by Israeli police. Due to the Israeli separation barrier, Khoury is one of many Jerusalemites who struggle to live under the same roof as spouse and child, to not become cut off from parents and grandparents, and to show up at church or work on time. more …

"Saving lives, creating peace" The Lutheran magazine, July 2005

For two years Yusri Saifi’s infectious smile lit the rooms of young cancer patients at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. “Nobody cared that I was Palestinian,” he says. “They cared that I was a doctor. I was one of the team and had the same opportunities as
everybody else.’’ Until April, he was one of several doctors serving this Jewish hospital in West Jerusalem. That’s when the Palestinian doctor finished his residency and began serving as the lone pediatric oncologist at Augusta Victoria Hospital, a ministry the Lutheran World Federation owns and operates in mostly Arab East Jerusalem. more ...