USD Magazine Spring 2007

ouring Israel was supposed to help Donald De Angelo gain a greater appreciation T TEACHING THE TEACHER Wh i l e b omb s f a l l , e d u c a t o r l e a r n s a b o u t f a i t h by Kelly Knufken [ p i l g r i m a g e ]

He’s careful to say he doesn’t hold Israel blameless for all its actions. Still, “You stand in one spot and see Syria and Lebanon — both places hostile to Jews — and Palestinians live within their borders, and you see they’re cornered. You can definitely begin to appreciate what they must go through every single day just to survive.” The tour took the group to reli- gious sites in Israel; at each there would be a Bible reading.“We had a priest and a rabbi with us the whole time — it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke,”he quips. The priest would give the tradi- tional Catholic interpretation, and the rabbi would talk about what life was like for a 1st-century Jew. “It was just amazing. It makes you

in Lebanon. Later, the bombs dropped in Israel. The group arrived in Tiberius just an hour after a bombing. They also got a glimpse of the life-goes-on attitude of Israelis when they could see smoke from the clash while people continued to water-ski on the Sea of Galilee.“There’s something in your head that says,‘Those are bombs falling,’”he says.“But the tour guide kept going, so some- thing in you says,‘I guess there’s nothing wrong.’ It was very surreal.”

aimed at bringing lessons about the holocaust and anti-Semitism into classrooms. The impact of their trip was immediate. “Everything there had mean- ing — spiritual, historical — it was very intense the whole time. Your faith really comes alive when they say, ‘Jesus stood right over there.’” De Angelo still mar- vels at the experience. As the group toured Golan Heights, they heard a reverberating boom. The fighting had begun

of Judaism. But it also helped him make a deeper connection with his own Catholic faith. De Angelo and a few dozen other Catholic teachers from around the country left for Israel in mid-July, arriving just in time for the outbreak of war with Lebanon. The group was participating in the Anti-Defamation League’s “Bearing Witness” program,

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