BETHLEHEM, West Bank: Walk out of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, across Manger Square and along Star Street and you come to a part of town where few pilgrims venture. Behind a discreet plaque saying ‘Crèche’ is a children’s home — the only one that many illegitimate and abandoned children brought up there have ever known.
Run by Catholic nuns from the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul and Palestinian staff, it is a refuge for around 50 children, including those born out of wedlock, at risk of violence and even rescued from garbage bins. There are children’s refuges all over the world, all dealing with similar issues. But the Crèche bears the emotional weight of being in the traditional birthplace of Jesus, where the focus of the Christian world turns once a year to a story from Bethlehem that celebrates birth, family and hope.
Although a Christian institution, the children are raised as Muslim according to local law, unless the staff know the religion of the family that gave them up. In 95 per cent of cases Iskandar Andon, the social worker who oversees the children’s welfare, gets advance warning of a child conceived out of wedlock or from an incestuous relationship, but sometimes the first he knows is when he gets a call from the police that a baby has been found abandoned.
“For me as a social worker that lives with these children on a daily basis, I have the honour to be responsible for them, or to be part of their lives,” Andon, 52, said. But he does not underplay the emotional difficulties. Relatives may be violent, or drug addicts, or the children and mothers at risk from honour killings.
“It involves an ethical and moral responsibility, a professional responsibility,” he said. Founded at the turn of the 19th century, the institution’s echoing halls are a home from birth until the age of five. But the Crèche is short of money, especially this year, amid donor fatigue and the coronavirus which struck Bethlehem first in the Palestinian Territories, just before Easter. — Reuters
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