With only 30 people in the room, the many empty chairs in the makeshift church in South Tel Aviv made the place look almost abandoned. But longtime members of the congregation said that there were more people here this time than on other weekends. People who had given up coming to services for fear of the immigration police had come this day to bid farewell to Pastor Ronald Ustares, his wife Mimi, and their daughter Miracle.

The Ustares family had joined the Immigration Authority's voluntary departure program. "Voluntary departure?" Ustares asked bitterly, "Better to say I surrendered to the fear they instilled in my daughter. I would never leave voluntarily."

The church where Ustares served as pastor is one of dozens of Evangelical churches still operating throughout Israel in private apartments, shelters and rented industrial premises. The Way of Life Filipino church in Netanya closed as did the Power of Resurrection African church in Tel Aviv. The head pastor of the latter church, Empardo Niarco, boarded a plane full of deportees bound for Ghana two weeks ago. "This congregation, which in its better days had about 200 members, lost so many people that there was no justification for its existence," a man familiar with the congregation explained last week. "The head office of the church in Ghana understood this and told Pastor Empardo to come home. Whoever remained is now looking for a place to pray."

"For us, the church was much more than just a place to pray," A., a woman who works in Netanya and was a member of the Way of Life church, explained. "Work with sick and old people can be difficult and monotonous. So on our day off, we would go to pray, meet friends, hear a little bit of our own language. We would laugh at jokes that everyone knows. That gave us the strength for another week of work. Now I almost never go out. I take a day off once every two or three weeks and go to visit friends. The rest of the time I am alone."

A. had almost decided to leave, she said, but then she received bad news from home. "My mother wrote me that her sister, my aunt, had been hospitalized. They think she has cancer. She needs an operation and that costs money, so how can I leave? There was a time when if I received bad news like that, I could come to church and everyone would pray together about my aunt. It would give me support and encouragement that if so many people were praying, God must surely be listening. Now I have no church and there is no one to pray for me."

Prayer at the Evangelical churches are often of a very personal nature, and according to P., a pastor at the Luz Del Mundo South American church, many prayers are offered lately for those who have left. "We pray that they have an easy journey and success in the place to which they are going, which for so many is a new and unknown place, after years of absence." Services at Luz Del Mundo have changed from Sunday to Saturday, because so many congregants received job offers that include housing. P. says that there used to be little demand for such jobs, because people wanted their after-hours free time, but with the increase in deportations, a live-in job began to look safer, and people no longer have time to come to services after work, but only on Saturday, their free day.

N., a preacher in another African church, says that his church, which once had a congregation of 50, now only has four or five members left. "Some are just afraid to come, or they gave up and decided to leave," he says. Since the believers have stopped coming to him, N. now makes house calls. "People need encouragement and spiritual support more than ever now. Some people have developed symptoms of anxiety or trauma. That is the reason I am not leaving. There are people here who need me." G., a woman pastor at a Filipino church taking in members from other churches that have closed, says, "People without a church become depressed. They cry, some over their church that has closed, some over a pastor who has left." Many prayers in her services are for the protection of pastors from deportation, because when a pastor leaves, she says, it affects everyone badly; many of the pastors do not represent recognized churches in Israel so it is very difficult for them to obtain clergy visas. "Many of the pastors are themselves care-givers for the elderly, and when their visa expires they become illegal themselves, and now, many of them are leaving and their churches are falling apart," she says. "Our services are normally joyful; now it is very difficult to find happy words," G. adds.

A debt to the Jewish people


Levanda Street near the Tel Aviv central bus station, once a center of small industry, has become a street of churches over the last decade. But since the increase in deportations, the churches have closed one after the other, and in those that remain, the songs of joy once heard from open windows and doors are silent. Even the Church of St. Peter in Jaffa, the city's venerable Catholic church, has been affected. There used to be standing room only for weekend prayer services, and now there is no shortage of seats. Many who dare show their faces slip out right after the service, fearful that the police will be waiting for them. "We used to stay for hours after the service," one worshiper remembers. "We would talk, hear what was going on with our friends, sometimes we would walk around Jaffa a little and do some shopping. Taxis would line up to collect people after services. Now people leave quickly and catch the first cab they see. Many prefer to walk because it seems safer."

As in years past, this year too, the members of the Luz Del Mundo congregation fasted on Yom Kippur in identification with the Jewish people. Special prayers were offered for the peace of Israel, as in most Evangelical churches. Pastor P., explains that they do so because they feel "indebted to the Jewish people," but also because "we think that there is a connection between everything that happens in the region. If there is peace, perhaps the economic situation will improve and the government will stop harassing us." Unlike previous years, alongside prayers for Israel, this year special prayers were said for lifting the threat of deportation, and special fasts were held. "We are weak, what can we do?" one worshiper asked. "Fasts and prayers are our only weapons against the deportation."

A week ago Saturday, Ronald Ustares sat in a corner of his church going over his sermon notes one more time. In his sermon, he told his own story. Like so many others from his country, he arrived here at the beginning of the 1990s with a work permit. "I was 28 years old, I thought that I would work for a few years, earn some money, and return." But then on one of his weekends off, he met Mimi. "She took me to a service at her apartment," he recalls. A love affair grew from that meeting, and the Evangelical church gained another believer. When their work visas ran out, they were already deeply rooted in Israel, their little girl chattering in Hebrew with her friends. Ustares understood that he not only represented his congregants before God, but before the authorities as well. He joined the organization of Filipino workers in Israel, and became its spokesman.

But Ustares says he decided to leave when he saw the psychological damage the Immigration Authority's latest campaign was doing to his daughter. "Every day she saw children in kindergarten whose father was taken, and then she heard they were going to take the children as well. Once, when I brought her home from school, there were police near the house. She started crying hysterically and we had to hide in a nearby store. I tried to explain to her that they were municipal police, and they were not looking for us, but she would not stop crying. When we finally came home, my wife said, `We can't go on like this.'" Ustares did not tell the congregation his story as a tale of woe. He focused on the good things that had happened to him - his family, his newfound faith - peppering his rendition with biblical quotes. "When I read the Bible I discovered that God actually loves foreigners. Read Genesis and you will find that the Jewish people themselves were strangers. Here in the Holy Land there was famine, and the Jews went down to Egypt to seek their living. They were strangers, and God loved them. More than once, God told His people to behave well toward the stranger. We are the stranger, and God loves us."