Published: 10 August 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
YASMIN AND IYAD MET IN southern Brazil, amid the folds of volcanic hills and slices of dense woodland, where a bit of paradise known as “New Galilee” nestles. She’s from Haifa; he’s from a small village in the “original” Galilee. Different life circumstances brought them to Brazil.
Yasmin was 21 when the leader of the Golden Valley Church, from the northern Galilee village of Abu Snan, suggested to her parents that they join an Israeli Christian messianic community that was being established in Brazil. She had just completed studies in cosmetics and taken initial steps in the profession, but the cleric and spiritual leader Fateen Yacob, and his brother, Milad, urged her parents to make the move.
“My mother had just been diagnosed with cancer and they told her that God is speaking with her, that if she follows them the cancer will pass,” Yasmin relates. “She started going to church, and as fate would have it, she got well.
They also told her that there would be a big war here, and shortly afterward the war of 2006 [the Second Lebanon war] took place, in which we in Haifa suffered very much. There was a series of coincidences, where everything they said would happen, happened.”
These portents persuaded Yasmin’s parents to follow the Yacob brothers to a community of Arab Christians from Israel that they had founded in the foothills near the town of Campo Alegre in the state of Santa Catarina, in south-eastern Brazil.
FULL STORY The Christian cult that lured Israeli Arabs to rebuild the Galilee in Brazil (Haaretz)
Photo: The New Galilee community in Brazil (Courtesy Adham Shaheen)
