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Revision 8.6 “Near Eastern Missions and a Branch in Jerusalem”

Revision 8.6 “Near Eastern Missions and a Branch in Jerusalem”

Last updated on: December 6, 2020 at 12:11 pm by Dan Peterson

Revision 8.6 “Near Eastern Missions and a Branch in Jerusalem” 2020-12-06T12:11:52-07:00 Dan Peterson

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A sunset near Beirut, Lebanon. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

President Booth’s sudden death did not end missionary work in the Near East. No new mission president was called until 1933, however, when an Armenian by the name of Badwagon Piranian was appointed to preside over what would now be called the Palestine-Syrian Mission. He rented a new mission home, at 25 Garden Street in Haifa, and immediately went to work. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the work that he had to do involved cleansing the portion of the Church that was under his charge. Following directions from Elder Widtsoe, President Piranian began an attempt to wean the members from dependence on Church welfare and the dole, to which many had become addicted during the troubled times of the 1920s. Such assistance had helped them greatly and in some cases had perhaps even saved their lives. But it had now become an obstacle to the development of their own character and self-reliance. Nearly a hundred of the never-very-numerous Near Eastern Saints were excommunicated, many at their own request, and a number of them chose to move to the Soviet Union, hoping to live in the new earthly utopia promised by communism. It was a depressing and difficult experience for the missionaries.

In many respects, things grew even worse for President Piranian’s successor. Joseph Jacobs, a Salt Lake City school teacher, was called to preside over the Palestine-Syrian Mission in August 1937. This was a time of mounting violence by Arabs against Jews and by Jews against Arabs. He was spared some of this, as he spent his first two years working in peaceful Beirut. However, during a visit to Jerusalem in the summer of 1939 he intended to survey conditions for missionary work there and learned that a bomb had gone off in Haifa and had killed seventeen Arabs and wounded many more. In Jerusalem, the streets were funereal and nearly deserted. Tension was everywhere. The day after his arrival in the city, an Arab coffee shop was destroyed by a bomb, which left two dead and a number of others wounded. As one local man explained the situation to him, “Jerusalem is a holy city with unholy people living in it.” Not surprisingly, President Jacobs decided that the time was not right for opening missionary work in Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, conditions were hardly ideal anywhere. It was, after all, 1939. Hitler and Nazi Germany were moving the world toward a brutal war. On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. On 17 September, Soviet forces attacked that same unfortunate country from the east. The war had begun. Not long after his return to Beirut, President Jacobs was withdrawn to the United States and the Palestine-Syrian Mission was closed.

In September of 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, the Palestine-Syrian Mission was reopened, again under the experienced leadership of Badwagon Piranian and his wife, who had previously presided over it during the years from 1933 to 1937. Things had changed a great deal. Two branches of the Church still existed within the mission, one in Aleppo and the other in Beirut, with a few members scattered in Damascus and Jerusalem. Altogether, the membership within the mission was less than seventy. Thus, the mission president and the elders who worked with him decided to concentrate their efforts on proselyting. At the first, they worked mostly with Armenians. Gradually, however, they began to work with the English- and French-speaking populations in Beirut and Tripoli, including a large number of Palestinian Arab refugees. One technique that was used to gain publicity for the Church was the organization of a missionary basketball team. Even when they lost, as in a game against the Syrian Olympic team in 1949, they won friends. Their star was a missionary by the name of Carlos E. Asay, who later went on to tour throughout the Middle East as a member of the Lebanese National Basketball Team and, much later, to serve in the First Quorum of the Seventy.

With the changing political conditions in the region, which made it impossible to preach the gospel in either Syria or Israel/Palestine, the Palestine-Syrian Mission was rechristened as the Near East Mission. Unfortunately, by the close of 1950 it had become evident that the disturbed situation of the entire Near East made any kind of missionary work impossible in most areas. The mission was therefore closed, and the missionaries were transferred to different fields of labor in Europe and elsewhere. President Piranian was sent to Fresno, California, to continue his service among the large Armenian immigrant population in that area. The few members remaining in Beirut and Aleppo were placed under the jurisdiction of the Switzerland Mission. A few missionaries, sent from Switzerland, continued to labor in Beirut.*

Well over a hundred years of intermittent missionary labor in the Near East have produced only relatively scanty results. The golden age of conversions came in the 1890s. Most converts were Armenian Christians, with a fair number of Germans also figuring in the totals. Some Greeks and Bulgarians joined the Church, along with a very small number of Arabs and Turks. Efforts among these latter groups were limited by the fact that very few missionaries ever became proficient in the languages that were necessary in order to reach them. Foreign customs, political restrictions and instabilities, and, of course, Islam itself all served as further barriers to the success of the missionaries. (I have not even mentioned the Church’s short-lived mission in Iran, which had to be abandoned when the Islamic revolution turned that country into a xenophobic religious tyranny.)

However, while the missionary efforts of the Church in the Near East were winding down or entirely absent, its activity in the Holy Land actually began to grow in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A study group from Brigham Young University first came to Israel in the winter and spring of 1968. David B. Galbraith, a Canadian Latter- day Saint, arrived in Israel in 1969 with his Dutch-born wife, Frieda, in order to pursue a doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In February 1972, the first of what would be a regular series of BYU study groups arrived, and the growth of an LDS presence in Israel began perceptibly to accelerate. Already by April of 1972, hopes for a memorial to Orson Hyde and for a Latter-day Saint visitors’ center were under discussion among ambitious members of the Church there. From the beginning, however, an unofficial, non-legal ban on proselyting in Israel was closely observed by the Saints, both residents and visiting students.

In the fall of 1972, President Harold B. Lee, accompanied by Elder Gordon B. Hinckley of the Council of the Twelve and by President Edwin Q. Cannon of the Switzerland Zürich Mission, became the first president of the Church to visit the Holy Land since the days of the first Christian apostles. While there, at a meeting at the Garden Tomb on 20 September 1972, President Lee organized the Jerusalem Branch, calling David B. Galbraith and setting him apart as branch president. John A. Tvedtnes, a graduate student in ancient Near Eastern studies at the Hebrew University, was set apart by Elder Hinckley as first counselor. During this historic visit, the matter of a visitors center and the question of a memorial monument to Orson Hyde were again subjects of conversation. (Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek himself had independently suggested an Orson Hyde monument some time before.)

Another upshot of President Lee’s visit to Jerusalem was his eventual approval of the members’ custom, already established there, of holding their church meetings on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. For many reasons, this seemed the practical thing to do, and President Lee signaled his approval of it by letter after his return to the United States. It was a striking demonstration of the Church’s flexibility, under prophetic leadership and divine authority, in adapting to new situations without compromising on basic principles. The letter also authorized branches in Muslim countries to hold their meetings on Fridays, in keeping with the practices of the societies in which they are located.

* The Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical connection between Switzerland and Beirut continued for decades. In 1972, when I received my own mission call to Switzerland, my stake president was sent papers indicating that I had been called to serve in “Switzerland (Beirut).” I soon discovered that the Switzerland Zürich Mission, probably because it was based in a neutral country, was responsible at the time for much of Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, including a district of missionaries in Lebanon. It was not until Edwin Q. Cannon, my mission president, picked me up at the airport near Zürich that I learned where I would spent my next two years.

Brigham Young University

BYU

Carlos Asay

Carlos E. Asay

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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