Asher Raby: The Serial Killer Who Murdered Saint Philoumenos

 

 

Asher Raby – Profile of a Serial Killer

By Avi Davidovich (8/4/2017)

The article "Serial Murder in Israel" provides a comprehensive overview of the serial killers discovered in Israel. One of them was Asher Raby, who operated in the country between 1979 and 1982. During 6 different attacks, he murdered five people, injured 10 others, and attempted to murder another victim. 15 of his 16 victims were Arabs, 6 women, and 4 children.

Like many serial killers, Raby used cold weapons, but he also used firearms, mainly when he wanted to commit mass murder – similar to mass murderers. One of the murders he committed – the murder of the monk George Philoumenos – caused Israel great embarrassment throughout the Christian world. Asher Raby was included in the category of psychotic serial killers, which is rare compared to the other categories of serial killers. Asher Raby was 36 years old when he was caught after a series of murders he had committed over the years. He told his interrogators that he had acted on divine command. According to him, God commanded him to expel evil.

Saint Philoumenos of Jacob's Well According to William Dalrymple

 

The Anglican Hostel, Nazareth, 20 November
 

Around 570 a.d., after he was first professed as a monk at the Abbey of St Theodosius, John Moschos withdrew into the wilderness and spent ten years in the remote cave monastery at Pharan, to the north of Jerusalem.
 

Pharan, the modern Ein Fara, is reputedly the oldest abbey in Palestine. It was founded in the early fourth century by the great Byzantine hermit St Chariton, who, it is said, settied here in a cave above a pool of pure spring water. There he gathered a community of like-minded ascetics around him, living a life of silence, self-abnegation and severe fasting, interspersed with long hours of prayer. Two hundred years later, Moschos appears to have been drawn to the site less by its antiquity than by the wisdom of its then hegumen, Abba Cosmas the Eunuch. In a crucial passage in The Spiritual Meadow, Moschos credits Cosmas with first giving him the idea to collect the sayings of the fathers: 'Whilst he [Abba Cosmas] was speaking to me about the salvation of the soul, we came across an aphorism of St Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria. And the elder said to me, "When you come across such a saying, if you have no paper with you, write it on your clothing" - so great was the appetite of Abba Cosmas for the words of our holy fathers and teachers.' It was advice that was eventually to lead Moschos to compiling The Spiritual Meadow, and so to preserve the otherwise largely unrecorded history of the monks of Byzantine Palestine.