‘Hebrew Catholic’ association launches in Israel
Monday, 11 August 2025 ()
Bishop Yaacoub Camil Afram Antoine presides over a Mass celebrating the launch of the Association of Hebrew Catholics on Aug. 8, 2025, at St. Thomas Syriac Catholic Church in Jerusalem. / Credit: Yarden Zelivansky
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 11, 2025 / 12:19 pm (CNA).
A group dedicated to providing a welcoming space for Jewish converts to Catholicism has launched in Israel.
The Association of Hebrew Catholics celebrated its official launch with a Mass on Aug. 8, the eve of the feast of its patron, St. Edith Stein, who was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.
The Syriac Catholic Exarch of Jerusalem, Bishop Yaacoub Camil Afram Antoine, acted as host for the event and celebrated the Mass, which took place at St. Thomas Syriac Catholic Church in Jerusalem.
Yarden Zelivansky, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and member of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who worked to bring the Association of Hebrew Catholics to Israel, told CNA that about 30 people attended the event.
Zelivansky said he hopes that as the group grows, its major events planned throughout the year will attract more people.
“Here in Israel, we’ve chosen as the local patron St. Angelus of Jerusalem, who was a Jewish convert to the faith and grew up in Jerusalem,” Zelivansky said, noting the Carmelite saint’s record of evangelism with the local Jewish community.
“Almost all of the Hebrew Catholic saints are Carmelites,” he added.
Yarden Zelivanksy was baptized on Nov. 11, 2021, at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Vienna. Credit: Yarden Zelivansky
The Association of Hebrew Catholics was founded by Carmelite priest Father Elias Friedman, OCD, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who lived at Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel.
The group plans to host many events, including the celebration of St. Angelus’ feast day as well as observing some of the major Jewish holidays. “We plan to see how we can celebrate [Jewish holidays] in the light of Christ,” Zelivansky said.
“A lot of us see within the Jewish liturgy and within the Jewish holidays, since they are originally from the Old Testament, very, very strong Christological elements,” the Tel Aviv native continued. “So we plan to celebrate all these holidays in a modified way, which brings out Christ that’s already in them, as we see it.”
As a lay apostolate, the group will not set up parishes or facilitate the sacraments. The Vicariate of St. James the Just, founded similarly for Hebrew-speaking Catholics and which is part of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, is in place to do that already.
“We are trying to set up this space where we will be focusing more on Jewish culture, which may or may not be in Hebrew,” he noted. “There are a lot of people who came in recent years from the Soviet Union whose Jewish identity is very important to them, so we may end up having activities in the Russian language as well. Our focus is not linguistic, it’s cultural.”
In addition to having the support of the Syriac Patriarchate, Zelivansky met with and secured approval for the group with the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, OFM, and several other heads of smaller faith communities within the Catholic Church, whom he said “have all been very excited to see where this is going.”
Since most of the group is canonically Latin, Zelivansky said he wanted to have the patriarch’s approval. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who was not himself of a Jewish background who understood this issue so well,” Zelivansky said of Pizzaballa. During their meeting, he recalled speaking with Pizzaballa about the group, theology, the current state of the Church, and Pope Leo XIV.
“It was a wonderful conversation,” he recalled. “[Pizzaballa] is a delightful man, and it really was a pleasure to see how deeply he understands this issue.”
*Reception in Israel *
Reactions to the Association of Hebrew Catholics will likely be “mixed,” according to Zelivansky. “Like any other country in the region, Israel is made up of a lot of different subcultures.”
For example, he said, while secular Jews will likely remain indifferent, the religious Jewish community might take issue with the group, not because it is a Christian community but because it is a community of Jewish converts. However, he said the goal of the association is not to evangelize but rather to reach Jews who have already converted.
Ultimately, what Zelivansky is “most excited for” is to see how Orthodox Christians who have a Jewish background or Messianic Jews will react to the association.
“I think what a lot of people don’t appreciate, Jews have historically often rejected Christianity, not just for the theology but for the culture,” he explained. “Because for Jews, their heritage and their culture are not just an ethnic thing.”
Jews have often “rejected Christianity because they were forced to assimilate or they were expected to assimilate when that happens,” he continued. “And it’s unimaginable for them to stop being Jews because it’s their inheritance from God.”
“I think being able to maintain that inheritance while being orthodoxly Catholic, once the Church really knows how to facilitate that for the people of Israel, it’s going to be a historical moment,” he stated.
*Origins*
“The idea [for the association] is that every culture that Catholicism, Christianity, was brought to, the faith was enculturated into whatever the culture was,” Zelivansky explained, pointing to the expressions of various rites within the Church, which may be distinguished by their liturgies and musical expression.
However, he said, “for the vast majority of Christian history, Jews who converted were simply not afforded that opportunity for different reasons.” Jewish converts to Catholicism who lived in France, Italy, or Germany “were expected to just assimilate into whatever the local culture was.”
“Eventually, a few converts realized that there’s a need to create this space to see what it would look like if Jews could keep their Jewishness as Catholics,” Zelivansky said. “And that’s what the [association] is about, creating that space where you can bring the Jewish culture into the faith, into the Church, and see what that looks like in practice.”
While Israel does have the Vicariate of St. James the Just, he noted that the demographic of the ecclesial body has changed over the years. Most of its young people, he said, “are not Jewish converts to the faith but are, for example, the children of local immigrants and asylum seekers whose native language is Hebrew since they grew up [in Israel].”
While the vicariate does necessary work, Zelivansky said, the association is more closely tailored toward ministering to Jewish converts.
As such, Zelivansky said, “we decided to bring the work here.”
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