Rome, Italy, Mar 28, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In an article published Tuesday, Vatican observer Sandro Magister points out a relatively unknown but very important phenomenon for the survival of Christianity in the Holy Land: the arrival of the “invisible” Christians.
Magister writes in his weekly column for L’Espresso that according to statistics, the number of Christians belonging to the traditional communities of the Holy Land has been diminishing.
Nevertheless, Magister observes that one Italian expert on religious issues reports that there are a significant number of Christians not included in the statistics and that “if they were counted, they would revolutionize” the Christian community in Palestine.
According to Elisa Pinna, quoted by Magister, the “invisible Christians” are of Jewish origin. The majority of them arrived with the massive Jewish immigrations from Russia and the Ukraine which, between 1989 and 1993 brought more than one million people to Israel.