Minnesota -- The Rev. Rodrigue Constantin belongs to a rare group of Minnesotans who can carry on a conversation in Aramaic, the language believed to have been spoken by Jesus 2,000 years ago.

When he consecrates the bread during his Christmas services, Constantin's words, "Ho no den ee tow faghro deel," will carry an added authenticity, because this is how Jesus would have told his disciples: "This is my body."I find that people are really fascinated by the language; there's a mysterious aspect to it," said Constantin, of Holy Family Maronite Catholic Church in St. Paul. "There's a historic thread starting 2,000 years ago that has reached me."

He is among roughly 100 people in Minnesota who can order loaves and fishes -- or lefse and lutefisk -- in Aramaic. They are mainly immigrants from small Christian communities in southeastern Turkey, one of a few pockets of the Middle East where a dialect of Aramaic remains a living language.

Aramaic also lives on in Minnesota as a liturgical language, used during church services at Holy Family and St. Maron Catholic Church in Minneapolis.

"We're a small minority of people who speak this language, and we don't want it to die," said Zahura Can, one of about 80 Turkish immigrants in the Lakeville area whose everyday language is the Aramaic dialect called Syriac.

"It's a very, very old language, and we are proud to speak it," Can said. " We speak it to our children. All four of my children understand it well."

Sunday service

The power and longevity of the language was evident during a recent visit to Holy Family, the oldest Maronite church in Minnesota. It's a small church on St. Paul's West Side, where visitors are greeted by a sweet scent of incense and the warmth of candles flickering in front of statues of Mary and Joseph.

Standing at the altar, Constantin shifted from English to Arabic to Aramaic throughout the service. For centuries, Aramaic was used through the entire service, just as Latin was the liturgical language of Roman Catholics. Now about a quarter of the service is in Aramaic.

Even though the pews are filled mainly with second- and third-generation Middle Eastern immigrants, they say they feel the same strong pull to the language as Can.

Joanna Conover, for example, was watching the service from the choir loft, where she sang. She doesn't speak Aramaic, but her Lebanese father, who immigrated to St. Paul in the 1950s, did. Listening to the strange words stirs warm memories of her parents and taps a deep religious connection, she said.

"It's hard to describe it," said Conover, sitting next to the organ stacked with sheets of music. "It brings a real closeness to Jesus, and not just because he walked in Lebanon."

Constantin also feels that direct spiritual link. He has lived in the United States since 2001 but grew up in Lebanon.

For Minnesotans, attending a church where Aramaic is spoken "is very similar to visiting the Holy Land," he said.

"Our liturgy is the closest thing to establishing that connection between Jesus and Minnesota," he said. "And you don't need a passport for that."

Downstairs in the church social hall, Susan Youmes is having breakfast with her husband. The daughter of the Cans, she's among the next generation of Aramaic speakers, and proud of it. Listening to Aramaic prayers and songs in church, she says, "brings something to your heart."When I watched 'The Passion of the Christ,' I didn't have to read the subtitles," boasted the young mother from Burnsville.

Language of cinema

That comment brings a smile to the Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and Aramaic scholar who translated the dialogue in Mel Gibson's movie from English into the ancient language. He also was an adviser to producers of "The Nativity Story," released this month.

Syriac, the Aramaic dialect that Youmes and the Cans speak, is the modern language closest to what Jesus would have spoken, said Fulco, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

It's one of several remaining dialects of Aramaic, spoken widely across the Near East from about 700 B.C. to A.D. 700, he said. After that, Aramaic was gradually replaced by Arabic. Even Jews spoke Aramaic at the time, said Fulco, using Hebrew mainly for worship and scholarly work.

The language was best preserved in isolated Christian villages in Lebanon and Turkey, where small communities kept the language alive through their church liturgies and daily use. Often it was not easy.

Nadir Can, for example, said that people did not speak Syriac openly in his town for fear of retribution, and that his brother had to go to a monastery to learn to read and write it.

Ironically, when Can moved to the United States he found that it was taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago and many other U.S. universities.

Likewise, Sweden has a large population of these Turkish immigrants, and has been doing much to preserve the written and spoken language, he said.

In a sign of the times, the Cans have just ordered a satellite TV dish so they can pull down a new Syriac-language TV channel being broadcast from Sweden.

"I never imagined this," said Can.

By Jean Hopfensperger
www.startribune.com