One Man’s Divine Calling to Respond to 9/11 through Faith, Acceptance

By Ben Verdi, in response to http://www.pbs.org/itvs/caughtinthecrossfire/khader.html and http://www.curenyc.com/index.htm   

Rev. Khader El-Yateem was born in the West Bank in 1968, and was raised a Christian.  Now he sits on the board of an organization called “CURE: Community Understanding of Racial Equality” in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and four children, and makes his life as a Lutheran Reverend.  While he is a happily married, devoted father, there is something special about this reverend that puts him in an unusually opportunistic position to be a community leader on multiple fronts. 

That is, he is an Arab-American man who is also a Christian minister.  A rather well-known one in fact, for he was the subject of a PBS documentary series called “Caught in the Crossfire” which profiled Arab-Americans in post-9/11 American society and gleaned from them testimonies and responses to the tragedy as raw and authentic as they are inspirational.  

His is an unbelievable story.  Born in the West Bank, he was captured at the age of 20, along with the rest of his family, by Israeli soldiers and tortured for almost two months.  He eventually was released and almost immediately fell in love and got married to an Arab woman bound for America, leaving his home country and people to begin a new life in New York City, the bad taste of his past still in his mouth.

By September 11^th 2001, El-Yateem had earned his masters degree in Divinity and founded the Salam Arabic Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York.  After 9/11, however, his role in the community became one he couldn’t possibly have anticipated, but one he couldn’t have been better prepared for.  His church became an artistic response to 9/11 in some ways, as he personally helped counsel people of all faiths and backgrounds after the tragedy, as many Muslims as Chrisitians, as many people who’d lost someone in the collapse of the World Trade Center as people who had been attacked for the ways they looked and dressed in the time thereafter.  

To use his own words, Yateem says: “I feel like God calls me to be here.”  The “here” he refers to is New York City, and few who have benefitted from his counsel, his faith and his unending compassion for the community around him, would disagree.

It really does seem as though this perfectly-placed Arab-American’s response to 9/11, when considering the hard times he lived through as a young man on the West Bank, was engineered by a higher power. 

His resolve and faith, tested and refined in the torture chambers of his homeland, his peaceful and accepting view toward all the people who have sought his help since 9/11, and the ways in which he still attempts to deconstruct religious, racial and cultural barriers by working for the CURE organization in Brooklyn highlight one of the most noble ways that any New Yorker, Arab-American, or any person for that matter, has responded to 9/11.