Although some Israelis consider him to be a traitor for it, Froman on various occasions met with both Yasar Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Ahmad Yassin, the leader of Hamas, to discuss the possibility of a peaceful accord between Arabs and Jews. In 2008, Froman teamed up with Khaled Amayreh, a Muslim journalist who has close ties with Hamas, to work out a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The concord called for an immediate end to Palestinian attacks against Israelis in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Hamas representatives endorsed the plan, but the Israeli government ignored it.
Rabbi Froman believes that Jewish and Palestinian populations are too mixed for a two-state solution to work if both sides insist on strictly demarcated borders. As an alternative, he advocates two countries without borders, Israelis and Palestinians being citizens of two sovereign nations who just happen to occupy the same land. Jerusalem, he argues, should be a free international city in which people of all faiths live in peace with one another. “The key to peace is peace in Jerusalem,” he says, “to re-establish Jerusalem as the capital of peace in the world.” But he’s quite certain that the ultimate solution to the conflict must be religious rather than political. The externalities of the conflict obviously focus on geopolitical disputes over land. But the “core of the problem is religious,” and only when all sides recognize that their worship of the same God binds them more than territorial spats divide them will the problem be solved.
23 February
Wulfstan of Worchester
ca. 1008—1095
A Medieval Abolitionist
One of the many changes wrought by William the Conqueror’s 1066 invasion of England was the gradual replacement of all the island’s native Anglo-Saxon bishops with Normans. Only one was left standing: Wulfstan of Worchester. That he survived spoke to his great reputation for holiness. He had been a confidant of King Harold, slain on the field at Hastings, and this alone would have made him persona non grata to the Normans.
From an early age, Wulfstan was renowned for his great dedication to prayer. One of the stories about his early life has it that he was once so distracted from prayer by the aroma of a roasting goose that he forswore meat for the rest of his life—the reason he’s acknowledged as the patron saint of vegetarians. Although ordained a priest, Wulfstan left active parish ministry to live as a cloistered monk. But he was pulled back into the world in 1062 when he was consecrated bishop of a diocese whose seat was the town of Worchester.
During his episcopate, Wulfstan revealed himself as a social reformer who defended the poor and stood up to the Norman conquerors who oppressed them. Every day he washed the feet of twelve homeless men brought in from the street and distributed alms to them. He did this as both a reminder to himself of Christ’s teaching and as an example of compassion to those around him. Concerned about the number of hungry people in Worchester, he once invited the town’s wealthiest citizens to a banquet at the bishop’s palace. As they arrived, they were told that the bishop was running late and would soon arrive. When he eventually showed up, he brought with him several hundred of the town’s poor and quickly shamed the assembled dignitaries into serving them food and drink.
But Wulfstan’s greatest nonviolent effort at restoring justice had to do with the slave trade carried out in Bristol, the busiest seaport in his diocese. The town was the center of a thriving slave industry. Anglo-Saxon peasants who fell into debt were sold as slaves there and shipped off to Ireland to spend the rest of their lives in miserable servitude. Apparently no one thought much one way or another about the practice until Wulfstan stepped up to condemn it. Perhaps living under the domination of the Normans sensitized him to the cruelty of slavery. Correctly viewing it as an evil inflicted on an already oppressed peasantry, the bishop was relentless in his denunciation of it, preaching sermon after sermon in Bristol exhorting slave traders to abandon their distasteful line of business. Whether because he touched the slavers’ hearts or they wearied of listening to him, Wulfstan finally succeeded in stopping their traffic in human beings, making him one of the world’s first abolitionists.
24 February
Monika Hauser
24 February 1959—
Helping Women Reclaim Their Lives
Too frequently, sexual violence against women in wartime is reported by the media as simple criminal assault. Monka Hauser, founder of Medica Mondiale, a women’s advocacy organization, believes this is wrong-minded. Sexualized violence, says Hauser, is always a destructive “exertion of power over the immediate victim.” But in wartime, sexual assaults take on an entirely new vehemence. “They always have strategic significance, regardless of whether they were explicitly planned, tacitly encouraged, or merely tolerated,” because they “boost the morale of one’s own fighters and terrorize the enemy.” And it’s for this reason that sexual violence in wartime should be considered a weapon of terrorism and users of that weapon indicted for war crimes.
Hauser, an Italian gynecologist who studied in Innsbruck and lives in Cologne, first became familiar with rape as a strategy of war when she traveled to Bosnia in 1993 to treat sexual assault victims of that region’s conflict. Her experiences led her to found Medica Mondiale, which has worked with over one hundred thousand victimized women in such war-torn nations around the world as Afghanistan, the Congo, Israel, Liberia, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medica Mondiale’s mission is to create local support structures and counseling centers for women who have been sexually violated in wartime, to advocate for women’s rights, and to lobby for the official recognition of sexual violence in wartime as a war crime and not simply a civil one.
Hauser is especially concerned with eliminating the social stigma that wartime sexual assault victims often have to endure at the hands of their fellow countrymen. By ostracizing rape victims, notes Hauser, “society at home almost always continues the work of the rapists. Communities ostracize raped women and girls as blemishes on masculine/national honor or force them to remain silent if they want to survive socially.” This “non-recognition of rape as a form of torture and grave human rights violation” constitutes an indifference to it that Hauser sees as nothing short of shameful.
Throughout the history of warfare, but especially in the conflicts of the last century, women and children have been the primary casualties of armed conflict. The poverty, famine, and diseases exacerbated by war are typically seen as the chief causes of their victimization. But Hauser and Medica Mondiale are helping the world to see that sexual assault is another powerful way in which women become wartime casualties who must live with the scars of their experiences for years afterwards. She has devoted her career to accompanying “tens of thousands of traumatized women on their path towards reclaiming their lives.”
25 February
Jacob Hutter
ca. 1500—25 February 1536
Founder of the Hutterites
On an icy winter day in 1536, Jacob Hutter was stripped of his clothing, whipped half to death, drenched in brandy to make him combustible, and then burnt alive before a mob of mostly jeering onlookers. According to one of the few sympathetic witnesses to his execution, Hutter “gave a great sermon through his death, for God was with him.” Hutter’s crime was subversion of both political and religious authorities. A member of the Radical