Jerusalem’s Magnificat Institute: ‘Every day we witness a small but significant miracle’ 

Jerusalem, Jun 26, 2024 / 06:00 am

In the classrooms of the Magnificat Institute of Jerusalem, the music school of the Custody of the Holy Land, “every day we witness a small but significant miracle,” Franciscan Father Alberto Joan Pari, the institute’s director, told CNA.

Here, in the heart of the Old City, Israeli and Palestinian students and teachers — of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths — continue to meet and make music together while the longest war since the founding of the State of Israel is in its ninth month.

There is the Arab-Christian boy who, for the first time, interacts with a Jew, his teacher. Or the Muslim teacher who, for the first time, deals with a Jewish student. “In Jerusalem, these things are not spontaneous,” Pari explained.

“Sometimes they may work together as adults, but the type of relationship is always employer-employee. Here, however, it’s a teacher-student relationship, which qualitatively is very different and presupposes an emotional involvement that is not present in other contexts.”

The music school is about to reach its milestone 30-year anniversary. It was founded in 1995 thanks to the initiative of Franciscan friar Father Armando Pierucci, who was an organist at the Holy Sepulcher and taught Gregorian chant to the friars of the custody.

“After some time since his arrival,” Pari recounted, “he noticed that there was no music in the Old City of Jerusalem: No one was teaching it and no one was practicing it. That’s when he thought of making himself available to teach singing and playing music. He obtained permission from his superiors to use an old piano and started with the first group of students.”

Since then, the school — the only one of its kind in the Old City of Jerusalem — has grown every year.

“At the beginning, it was difficult to find teachers because music was not taught in schools, and few studied it professionally. The first teachers were two Christian women.”

Today, the Magnificat Institute welcomes more than 200 students each year (as young as 5 years old) and relies on the collaboration of 25 teachers. It has a choir and several orchestral groups. What hasn’t changed is the location of the school, which has been housed for 30 years in the basement premises of the convent of St. Savior, once used as a butchery area.

Since 2003, the Magnificat Institute has been the overseas branch of the “Arrigo Pedrollo” Conservatory in Vicenza, Italy, adopting the programs for preparatory teaching levels and first- and second-level academic diplomas. This agreement, confirmed in 2013, allows students to obtain academic diplomas recognized worldwide.

“The Magnificat [Institute] is unique even compared to other schools of the custody, which use Arabic as the base language and only have Christian and Muslim students,” Pari said. “Here, however, most teachers are Jewish, and among the students, the majority are Arab Christians and Muslims, but there are also some Jews. To communicate, we typically use English.”

Like any rose, even the Magnificat Institute has its “thorns,” and Pari didn’t hide them.

“There have always been some small difficulties in the relationships between such different worlds. Every time there is some discomfort in the city or in the country, it is also reflected in the attitudes of the students and the teachers. We can call them small tremors. But what happened on Oct. 7 [of last year] was a real earthquake that shook the balance that has been created in almost 30 years of school.”

After the first week of the war, during which the school was closed, Pari wrote to his teachers.

“I invited them to create an atmosphere of serenity for the children, who had never felt their lives and their future so threatened as in that moment,” he recalled. “I asked them not to talk about the war but to make the music lessons a moment of normality and beauty. And so it was.”

The school has reopened its doors to everyone and gradually has started to fill up again. In these months, it has also become a social cushion, a refuge for the children who often experience a poisoned atmosphere of war and are burdened by serious economic difficulties at home, with significant repercussions on them. But whoever enters here leaves the heavy baggage of war outside for a few hours.

Friday Orchestra

The so-called “Friday Orchestra” at the school is made up of Arab female students ages 18–20; the conductor is an Israeli Jew. 

“When the school reopened,” Pari recounted, “the students expressed their discomfort in meeting him: In their eyes, he represented the enemy who was killing their people in Gaza. The conductor started the lesson by saying, ‘I know you see me as the Israeli Jew, but I don’t see in you the ones who committed the massacre on Oct. 7. In this class, we try to create a better future where we can live together and do something beautiful.’ Since then, lessons never stopped.”

Pari is also a musician, having graduated in transverse flute. He played in an orchestra and taught in schools.

“Music has always played an important role in my life,” he said. “When I became a friar, I thought I would have to leave it behind. However, when I arrived here, I discovered that music is also central here — in the Holy Land, singing is fundamental in all liturgies. I consider it a gift that the Lord has given me. I thought I would have to give up music, but instead, in a different way, it is still at the heart of my service.”

In addition to being a musician and the director of the Magnificat Institute, Pari is also responsible for the Custody of the Holy Land for Interreligious Dialogue — a meaningful coincidence.

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“Although the Magnificat Institute was not born with this purpose, it has gradually developed as a space for interreligious dialogue,” he explained. “There are no specific programs or projects, but in fact, this dialogue occurs spontaneously through interaction. In our classes, small but significant miracles happen that wouldn’t be possible without Magnificat.”

One of the most striking stories is that of Emma Spitkovsky and her student Mohammad Al-Shaikh. Spitkovsky, a piano teacher of Ukrainian Jewish origin, chose to become a teacher at Magnificat, fully embracing its spirit. “It is here,” Pari recounted, “that she first encountered a Muslim, a Palestinian boy who became her best student. To make music, both had to break down their prejudices.”

Mohammed graduated from the institute two years ago. To attend classes, he would travel from Ramallah (in the Palestinian territories) to Jerusalem two or three times a week, sometimes waiting for hours at the checkpoint. In June 2023, he was the one who animated a musical evening in Jerusalem, a contribution from the local Church to the event “World Meeting on Human Fraternity, Not Alone” held in Vatican City.

On that occasion his teacher recounted: “When I met Mohammad, he was 10 years old: I immediately recognized his extraordinary talent. I am proud to have been his teacher. Despite our different faiths, our different cultures, what we can do together is not only possible but, above all, beautiful.”

Then there’s Musa, a young Muslim from Bethlehem who plays the clarinet. His teacher is a religious Jew from Jerusalem. Musa never received permission to travel to Jerusalem for lessons at Magnificat. “We found a Lutheran church located in a kind of ‘no man’s land’ that both could access,” Pari recounted. “Here, Musa and his teacher met for almost two years for their lessons.”

“All these stories go beyond any dialogue project, and we hope they bear fruit in this society,” Pari said. “Perhaps we won’t see the mature fruits of this tree, but we are witnessing it grow and blossom, and it is beautiful.”