The YU Israelite Samaritans Project is ready to launch, and you are invited to the festivities. For the last six years, Dr. Steven Fine, Dean Pinkhos Churgin Professor of Jewish History and director of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies (CIS), has been working with an international team of artists, scholars, friends and YU students to create the YU Israelite Samaritans Project.  The culmination of their yearslong efforts is close at hand. On March 27, 2022, at 2 p.m., the Project’s documentary, The Samaritans: A Biblical People, ha-Shomronim: Edah. Torah. Har., produced by renowned Israeli filmmaker Moshe Alafi, will have a special first public viewing at the YU Museum at the Center for Jewish History, followed by a conversation among Dr. Fine (who originated the film and served as academic adviser), Alafi and Dr. Erica Brown, director of the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership. Alafi has been engaged with the Samaritans for half a decade and is deeply embedded within the community.  This documentary reflects the depth of his engagement. (Register here for tickets to the event.)  

  Dr. Fine has edited a handsome book as the keystone to the entire project, also called The Samaritans: A Biblical People. According to the publisher, “This volume celebrates the culture of the Israelite Samaritans, from Biblical times to the present. An international team of historians, folklorists, a documentary filmmaker and contemporary artists have come together to explore ways that Samaritans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have interacted, often shunned and always interpreted one another across the expanse of western civilization.” A highlight is a series of “Tales of the Samaritan Elders,” recorded here for the first time. Published jointly by Brill Publishers and YU Press, this exquisite and affordable full-color volume will launch on March 27. “Our book is a welcoming entrée into Samaritan culture, history and our long relationships with these descendants of the Northern tribes of Israel,” said Dr. Fine. “It is written for both the general reader and the scholar and really reflects CIS’s mission to explore Israel ‘in all of its complexity.’” Add to this stunning contemporary artwork created by an international team of eight artists from the Jewish Art Salon. Andi Arnovitz, Judith Joseph, Richard McBee, Mark Podwal, Archie Rand, Joel Silverstein, Hillel Smith and Yona Verwer studied Samaritan culture with Dr. Fine, creating art based upon this group experience. People who come to the film screening will be treated to a pop-up exhibition of the artwork along with the chance to speak to many of the artists. And if the amazing film and the book with its accessible scholarship, artwork and splendid photography is not enough of a feast, those at the Center for Jewish History can explore the first-ever cookbook of Samaritan cuisine in English, Samaritan Cookbook: A Culinary Odyssey from the Ancient Israelites to the Modern Mediterranean. Just reading the description of its contents makes one’s mouth water and stomach grumble! Both volumes will be available for purchase at sizable discounts at the March 27 event.  

  In fall 2022, The Samaritans: A Biblical People shifts to The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., with a jointly organized international exhibition—the first anywhere to focus on the Samaritans (Sept. 15, 2022, to Jan. 2, 2023). The most important artifacts of Samaritan culture worldwide will be assembled for the first time and given “life” through magnificent videos produced by Alafi. After that, the exhibition crosses the Atlantic Ocean to the Bibelhaus Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, where it will open in February 2023. YU undergraduate and graduate students have been essential to this project from the beginning. Baruch-Lev Kelman ’21YC, ’23R, the Joseph and Faye Glatt Fellow at CIS, found his master’s thesis topic on Samaritan-Jewish relations along the way, and David Selis ’19YC, ’21R, now the Charney Doctoral Fellow at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, began working on this project at its inception. Selis is now associate curator of the exhibition. “I am particularly proud that Dr. Jesse Abelman ’21R, now curator of Hebraica and Judaica at the Museum of the Bible, is my partner in this project,” said Dr. Fine. Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, President of Yeshiva University, wrote in his Foreword to The Samaritans that the erudition revealed in the book, art and film, produced not only by people like Alafi and the artists but also by members of the YU community, students and renowned YU Jewish history scholars, shows “YU at its best: harnessing deep scholarship, a broad range of media, educational innovation, complexity and our hallowed past as we build for the future.” Surely, all of this was on Dr. Fine’s mind as he took the initial steps to create the YU Israelite Samaritans Project, but there were still deeper motivations, as he writes in the final chapter of the book, “Why The Samaritans?” One such deep impulse comes from a desire for reconciliation, a theme that resonates across our COVID moment. “Our project is an opportunity on the largest possible stage,” said Dr. Fine, “for us all to reflect—Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Samaritans—to think about otherness and complexity, about core issues of who each of us is and about what we hope to be.” As he points out, “reconciliation is not easy in our world, especially for a thirty-six-hundred-year-old enmity. In a real sense, then, this complex attempt at reconciliation is a model for us all.” The YU Israelite Samaritans Project “is a hallmark of our commitment to both Torah and Madda,” Dr. Fine writes with great energy, “to an integrationist impulse that looks out from and builds upon our core YU commitments.” In preparing the documentary, exhibition and books, the Samaritans, beginning with the high priest himself, “have embraced us, supported us, and shared their deepest fears and hopes with us in a very public way. In a real sense, we have become a mirror for the community, as the Samaritans plot and imagine their own future—and they for us, as we plot ours.” Dr. Fine gives special thanks to Tzili Charney, who established the Leon Charney Legacy Fund of the YU Center for Israel Studies and has steadfastly supported the Israelite Samaritans Project. Her generosity and partnership made possible the work of Moshe Alafi, the book, student fellowships and the learning that is at the heart of this project.  This is all the more meaningful since Leon Charney ’60YC was a driving force behind New York State’s Good Samaritan Laws. Come to the YU Museum on March 27! Again, register here for tickets to the event, and go to the Samaritans Project for more information.