Man arrested after assault on French nun in Jerusalem

‘Even if we are tempted to retreat in the face of the suffering and the wickedness that surround us, it is by turning toward others that we find Christ and his consolation.’

The Israel Police arrested a man on suspicion of racially motivated assault after an attack on a French nun in Jerusalem.

Police named Yona Schreiber, 36, as the suspect on Sunday. They arrested him on 28 April, the same day that a man in ritual Jewish attire was recorded on CCTV pushing over and kicking the nun outside the Cenacle in Mount Zion.

The police published footage of the attack on social media, as well as a statement that they would treat “any attack on members of the clergy and religious communities with the utmost seriousness”.

The victim, who was not named, is a 48-year-old Religious sister working at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Its director Fr Olivier Poquillon OP thanked those who came to her aid and offered support.

“The scourge of hatred is a common challenge,” he said in a social media post.

In its 2025 report on attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem, published on 30 March this year, the Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue recorded 155 incidents including 61 physical attacks.

On 27 April, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa issued a letter to the diocese on “living the vocation of the Church in the Holy Land”.

He said the conflict in the region “is an integral part of the life of our Church” and has become “the very place in which our Church is called to carry out its specific mission”.

“Even if we are tempted to retreat in the face of the suffering and the wickedness that surround us, it is by turning toward others that we find Christ and his consolation.”

The Abbot of the Dormition Abbey in Mount Zion warned last week that “the place where the most important events of our faith occurred risks losing its indigenous Christians”.

“My fear is that the Holy Land could become a kind of ‘Christian Disneyland’,” Dom Nikodemus Schnabel told Aid to the Church in Need.

“The Holy Places will remain, with monks and priests. But there might be no Christian families, no young Christians, no ordinary Christian life.”

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