Philoumenos (Hasapis) of Jacob's Well
New Martyr Archimandrite Philoumenos of Jacob's Well, 15 October 1913 – 29 November 1979, was the Hegumen of the Greek Orthodox monastery of Jacob's Well, near the city of Samaria, now called Nablus, in the West Bank.
Life
Saint Philoumenos was born Sophocles Hasapis on 15 October 1913, in the village of Orounta in the province of Morphou, in Cyprus.At the age of 14, he and his twin brother, the future Archimandrite Elpidios, left their home to become monks at the Stavrovouni Monastery in Cyprus where they stayed for 6 years and then left for the Holy Land to continue their monastic life and attended the local High School. He was ordained a priest and became a trusted priest of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, later being raised to the office of archimandrite.
In 1979, he was assigned as the guardian of the Monastery of Jacob's Well.
Death
Philoumenos was murdered on 29 November 1979. His assailant, Asher Raby, a mentally ill 37-year-old resident of Tel Aviv, had intruded the monastery and threw a hand grenade inside, which caused substantial damage. Philoumenos is said by investigators to have been fleeing the explosion and fire caused by the grenade when he was pursued by Raby and hit multiple times with an axe. Investigators stated that Philoumenos appeared to have been trying to protect his face with his hands when a blow to his face or head severed the one finger on each hand. Raby escaped the scene of the crime undetected.Raby was subsequently found to have acted alone, "without any connection to a religious or political entity."
An investigation launched by the Israeli police initially failed to identify the killer. Raby was arrested on 17 November 1982 as he again attempted enter the Monastery at Jacob's Well illicitly by climbing over a wall; he was carrying hand grenades. Raby supplied the police with accurate details of his earlier, previously unsolved, crimes. These were the murder of Philoumenos; a March 1979 murder of a Jewish gynecologist in Tel-Aviv; the murder of the family of a woman in Lod, Israel in April 1979 who claimed to have clairvoyant powers; and an assault on a nun at the Jacob's Well holy site in April 1982. The nun was seriously wounded in the attack. Both she and the gynecologist were attacked by axe, according to prosecutors.
Raby, a newly religious Jew, was described as unwashed, dressed in worn-out clothing, and audibly muttered passages of scripture in a strange manner. Psychiatric evaluations found that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial; he and committed to a mental hospital; details of his subsequent whereabouts are restricted by privacy regulations. At a court hearing after his arrest, an Israeli prosecutor told the court that Raby was convinced that the monastery was the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, and that he made an attempt on the life of the nun "in response to a divine command."
Erroneous accounts
Initial accounts depicted the murder as an anti-Christian hate attack carried out by a group of Jewish settlers, the result was what Maariv described as "a wave of hatred" in Greece. Reports indicating that "radical Jews" had tortured Philoumenos and "cut off the fingers of his hand" before killing him had appeared in Greek newspapers. Maariv also quoted an official in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem asserting that "the murder was carried out by radical religious Jews" claiming that "the Well does not belong to Christians but to Jews".In a 2017 article in the journal Israel Studies, researchers David Gurevich and Yisca Harani found that false accounts blaming the slaying on "settlers" and "Zionist extremists" persisted even after the arrest of the assailant and his confinement in a mental institution, and that there were "patterns of ritual murder accusation in the popular narrative." The same theme was echoed in parts of the Eastern Orthodox community and by some secular sources, including Blackwell's Dictionary of Eastern Christianity, the Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement, as well as Wikipedia.
Gurevich and Harani contended that a 1989 account of the murder, published in Orthodox America, a publication of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, became the basis of an anti-Semitic ritual murder narrative, according to which a group of anti-Christianity Jews first harassed Philoumenos and destroyed Christian holy objects at the monastery, then murdered him.
Veneration
In 2009 the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem recognised him as a holy martyr of the Eastern Orthodox Church, thirty years after his martyrdom. The "careful" wording of the pronouncement of the Jerusalem Patriarchate that canonized Philoumenos makes no mention of murderer's faith or ethnicity; he is described as a "vile man" a "heterodox fanatic visitor" and, inaccurately, as an individual who "with an axe, opened a deep cut across his forehead, cut off the fingers of his right hand, and upon escaping threw a grenade which ended the Father's life."Philoumenos was buried in Jerusalem in the Orthodox cemetery on Mt. Zion. Veneration extended to an alleged exhumation of Philoumenos' body four years after his death by members of the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem who testified that Patriarch Diodoros confirmed that the body was "producing a pleasant fragrance" and that "the rest of the body was incorrupt." The body was translated from the cemetery on Mt. Zion to the newly rebuilt pilgrimage church at Jacob's Well in 2008. Philoumenos' relics have traveled to locations including his home island of Cyprus where they have been venerated. A new church in Nicosia, Cyprus, was dedicated to Philoumenos in 2004. In 2008 reports of an anti-Semitic painting in Cyprus' Machairas Monastery that shows a stereotyped image of an ultra-orthodox Jew about to attack Philoumenos with an ax produced a promise from Cypriot Church authorities that the painting would be altered to remove the antisemitic imagery; as of 2016 it was still unaltered.
His feast day is celebrated on November 16 / 29, as per the decision of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 2009, seconded by the same resolution by the Patriarchate of Moscow and all Russia in 2010.
Churches on the New Calendar list his feast day directly on November 29.