Schools and Religious Institutions
Beit Jala is home to educational institutions run by a variety of Christian denominations, including the Arab Orthodox Benevolent Society. A Russian Orthodox school was established in 1870. The Latin Patriarchate Seminary, which supervises religious liturgical education in the Jerusalem Patriarchate, moved to Beit Jala in 1936.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL) has a congregation in Beit Jala. The denomination also runs the Talitha Kumi School in Beit Jala, which was founded by Lutheran deaconesses in the 19th century and relocated in Beit Jala in 1961. The school has developed an environmental education program and operates the only bird-ringing station in the Palestinian sector. The school also runs a guesthouse.
The Beit Jala skyline is dominated by several churches, among them the Church of the Virgin Mary and the Church of Saint Nicholas. According to tradition, St. Nicholas spent four years in the Holy Land. Both of these churches are Orthodox Christian.
The Syrian Orthodox Church runs the Mar Afram school in Beit Jala. Since 2007 Mar Afram has offered classes in Aramaic (more specifically, the Syriac dialect) to its students, which are taught by elderly residents of the town who still speak the waning language fluently. A similar program is run for Maronite children in the Palestinian Christian village of Jish.
Read more about this topic: Beit Jala
Famous quotes containing the words schools and, schools, religious and/or institutions:
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)
“If Jesus, or his likeness, should now visit the earth, what church of the many which now go by his name would he enter? Or, if tempted by curiosity, he should incline to look into all, which do you think would not shut the door in his face?... It seems to me ... that as one who loved peace, taught industry, equality, union, and love, one towards another, Jesus were he alive at this day, would recommend you to come out of your churches of faith, and to gather into schools of knowledge.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“Pray for the Liberty of the Conscience to revive among us.... Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“You can’t talk about a kind of democracy unless those who are affected by decisions make those decisions whether the institutions in question be the welfare department, the university, the factory, the farm, the neighborhood, the country.”
—Casey Hayden (b. c. 1940)