Father Bruno

Father Bruno Hussar (5 May 1911 – 8 February 1996) was the founder of Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, which means "Oasis of Peace," an Arab/Jewish village dedicated to coexistence. Father Bruno derived the name from the book of Isaiah (32:18) "My people shall dwell in an Oasis of Peace". Born in Cairo, he converted to Roman Catholicism while studying engineering in France. He was a genuinely 'transnational transcultural and multilingual' individual.

Before he founded the village, Father Bruno established the House of Isaiah in Jerusalem, a Jewish-Catholic ecumenical study center. He came to Jerusalem to establish this institution in 1952. For many years, he was also a leader and priest for the Hebrew Christians, a tiny congregation of Hebrew-speaking Catholic residents and Israeli Jewish converts to Catholicism.

He was born, André, in Egypt in 1911, the son of a Hungarian father and a French mother, both assimilated Jews. He grew up speaking several languages and used to call himself a "man with four identities". On completing his secondary schooling at the Italian School in Cairo, he moved with his family to Paris where he studied engineering. During his university studies, he was drawn to studying the problem of the nature of evil, and the figure o feel I have four selves: I really am a Christian and a Priest, I really am a Jew, I really am an Israeli and if I don’t feel I really am an Egyptian, I do at least feel very close to the Arabs who I know and lovef Jesus, and converted to Christianity. He received his French nationality in 1937. The experience of World War II, awareness of anti-Judaic and anti-semitic prejudice within his own confession, deepened his reflections, stirring an interest in his Jewish converso origins, and the desire to combine that heritage with his own adherence of the Catholic Church. This orientation was influenced notably through contacts with the philosemitic French-Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa. Refusing to disguise his Jewish origins, he was at risk in occupied France and had to flee the country. At war's end he studied philosophy in a Grenoble seminary and was ordained a Dominican priest on 16 July 1950, taking the name Bruno, after the founder of the Carthusian Order, Bruno of Cologne. He saw in the foundation of the state of Israel a step towards the fulfulment of a Christian salvific plan and was charged with establishing a Centre for the Study of Judaism in the Israeli sector of Jerusalem in 1953. He desired to establish a monastic brotherhood in Jerusalem as an anti-Torquemada symbol disavowing the persecutions of Jews which the Spanish inquisitor (who was himself a Dominican with Jewish ancestors)had undertaken. He encountered considerable difficulties with the Latin Catholic Hierarchy of the Holy Land, whose members were predominantly of Arab origin, and assisted in the establishment of the St. James Association to cater to the minority of Jewish Catholics, a year later, on the 14 December 1954, who were viewed with suspicion by Palestinian Catholics and marginalized by Israeli Jewish society. At the same time he undertook pastoral care of the Jaffa Arab Catholic congregation, which deepened his awareness of the complexities of life for Arab population in Israel.

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