A Christmas Story from Bethlehem Today
Angels of Hope From the Brokenness of the War

How can people earn a living in a city where the unemployment rate has reached almost 75 percent? Thousands of Palestinians who were better educated and more skilled were able to use contacts and receive work in other places.

At the International Center for Bethlehem (ICB), one Palestinian art teacher produced small stained-glass art pieces out of broken bottles and glass. This was the method she taught her students. She insisted that they not buy a new glass for their production but rather use old glass as a form of recycling.

Samar was one of those students. But she could not use this art to make a living. Who in the Palestinian community could afford to buy such items when they were worried about having enough to eat. The other market in Bethlehem, the tourists and religious pilgrims, has long disappeared.

Even so, Samar continued to come to a class on glass fusing offered during the intifada. The course was funded by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, with the idea of using broken glass to produce art pieces.

During April of 2002 Israeli military strike, tank shelling and air strikes on Bethlehem broke hundreds of windows. Broken glass became the symbol of our town's destruction. More importantly, the broken glass symbolized the broken hopes and shattered dreams of so many people.

Creative use of this broken glass matched the goals for the International Center of Bethlehem: shaping new symbols for a new reality, transforming the symbols of destruction and was into symbols of hope and peace.

Text on the card enclosed with the "angels of hope":
Human hands pick them from among the rubble then assemble them together by some of the poorest of the poor in the Bethlehem region at the ICB art workshops. These art pieces tell all about “the hopes and fears of all the years” that people have in Bethlehem today. The broken glass pieces are a sign of the brokenness of our world, and it is also the reason for God to incarnate. Through His incarnation he brought the divine and the human back together, He picked what seems to be worthless and hopeless and transformed it into a beautiful and whole creation. It is this incarnation, which took place here in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, which gives us the strength to continue to look for broken lives and hopes and to transform them through art into angels and different art pieces, messengers of justice, peace and dignity.

For more information on this project, go to:
International Center of Bethlehem or The Gift Shop of the International Center of Bethlehem