Volunteers at the Terra Sancta Museum: great joy but also great courage!
When you go into the corridors of the Custody of the Holy Land, the territory of the Franciscans, you are immediately plunged into the heart of Jerusalem: a real maze milling with life!
The atmosphere in the Cultural Heritage Department is warm and welcoming. On the terrace, a lively conversation is going on with three young Italian women who arrived in Jerusalem just under a year ago. Mariam and Giorgia, respectively aged 25 and 26, work on the database of the works of the Terra Sancta Museum. This database is indispensable so that the team can centralize and share information about the collections. One day, it will be accessible online for the joy of experts and researchers. For the time being, Maryam and Giorgia are patiently documenting the works, adding information to the database and the various bibliographies.
As the Custody has not yet completed the inventories, at times they have to spend time in the various sacristies to be able to take photos of the works. Both of them also play an important role in translation, as they have an excellent command of both Italian and English. This mainly ocncerns the articles on the website of the museum. Faithful to the universal mission of the Church and wishing to reach as wide a public as possible, the Terra Sancta Museum has decided to translated its site into no fewer than five languages. This commitment allows our young translators to discover the immensity of the project: the inauguration of exhibitions, presentation of the archaeological collections, preparation of scientific catalogues etc.. On the other hand, Margherita, a young archaeologist of 25, works in the Museum of the Flagellation, at the beginning of the Via Crucis. After the first few months devoted to an important work of inventory, she is writing articles to make the specificity and the value of the collections of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum better known.
A DIVERSITY OF PROFILES
Two other volunteers have accepted the challenge in communication: François-Joseph, 24 years old, and Augustin, ten years his senior. Both have rather unusual backgrounds: the former has lived in Jerusalem for a long time with his family; he is a frequent visitor to the Custody and the Franciscans, putting himself at their service while he writes his thesis on their apostolate in the Holy Land in the 17th and 18th centuries. The latter has matured various types of experience, including at Radio France and the French Parliament as parliamentary attaché before settling in Jerusalem. Augustin, who manages the website, supervises the editorial planning, the variety of subjects dealt with and the formats and is never short of work, with the website, the Facebook and Instagram pages, all platforms requiring constantly updating.
Despite their differences, these five volunteers agree on the richness of their experience. Working for the Custody of the Holy Land is a privilege that has allowed them to develop skills and has turned out to be a launch pad for their professional careers, meeting numerous experts and important figures in the ecclesiastical world. These significant encounters would not have been possible if they had not volunteered at the Custody.
VOLUNTEERS IN TIMES OF WAR
The outbreak of the war on 7 October 2023 changed things. The situations has rarely been so tense and violent, even though Jerusalem remains one of the “safest” cities. They had to decide whether to stay or to leave. Their missions have undergone an evolution, becoming more in-house, but this has not at all lessened the volunteers’ enthusiasm or motivation. They have had the courage to stay. What strikes me is the joy and the positive energy that they put into their daily work at the Custody. They are well aware that they are taking part in a major project: the creation of a museum in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. They acknowledge that it is not always easy with the war that is taking place just a few hundred kilometres from the Holy City.
They are worried and sometimes they are also frightened, but they are driven by something more: being here to stay open to others, whoever they are, in a county which is being increasingly divided. The two French volunteers, François-Joseph and Augustin nevertheless warn us: they encourage all young people to come to the Holy Land on voluntary service, but they must have some knowledge of the geopolitical context of the country. In their opinion, it is essential to know the history of the country and understand certain codes of the population, It is also important to know about the life of the Franciscans, their missions and the importance of their presence in the Holy Land for centuries. They have to learn and document themselves before coming to work in the Holy Land, especially in the current situation. The Land of Christ has to be deserved!
Something that Margherita said made a very deep impression on me during our conversation: “When we hear the fighter jets in the sky, we stop for a second to pray… because when for us life goes back to normal after those few noisy seconds, for others life will have changed forever. This isn’t normal, even if we get used to this fatality.”
The Custody of the Holy Land, the protector of the Holy Places, is proceeding with a project of great scope to highlight Oriental and Eastern Christian art in Jerusalem. The challenge is enormous because as well as looking after the places, it is essential the prepare the ground for mediation which must be an “open door” for as many people as possible. The Franciscans have an advantage thanks to their knowledge of the country – where they have lived for 800 years – and the many strong bonds with the local population. The Terra Sancta Museum aims to be a place for everyone, without or volunteers in the front line and, there is no doubt that the others who have preceded them in the past ten years will be present when the ribbon is cut! This great adventure would not have been possible without them!
