The modern trials of the ancient SamaritansA couple of excerpts:
By Helena Merriman
BBC News, Nablus
The Samaritan community has lived in the Middle East for thousands of years - but they are having to find new ways to secure their future, Helena Merriman reports from the West Bank.
Before, they would take sides, but now they are trying a new approach - neutrality.Alexandra was mentioned in PaleoJudaica here (and under the name "Shura" here?). I have also noted Mr. Sedaka's and Ms. Sullivan's Samaritan Torah project here.
They are building good relations with their Palestinian and Jewish neighbours and are unique in the region for having both Israeli and Palestinian identity papers.
This means they can travel between Israel and the West Bank with ease.
Some entrepreneurial Samaritans are now using their unique status to offer a delivery service to businessmen in the West Bank town of Nablus, just a few miles away from Mount Gerizim.
Many Palestinian businessmen there export goods to towns in Israel, but because they have to go through Israeli checkpoints, deliveries can be slow.
An exporter of car parts to Nazareth and Haifa, Ibrahim, pays the Samaritans to take some of his goods to Israel.
"The Samaritan drivers help us because they can take goods to Israel in one day," he tells me at his shop.
"If you want a Samaritan driver, you call them, they take the goods in their cars and return back to Nablus without the checkpoints."
[...]
Mr [Joseph] Cohen tells me that since there are many more men than women, they have to look outside their own community to find potential wives.
Some Samaritans have been using the internet to find brides from other countries, and he introduces me to Alexandra from the Ukraine, who converted to the Samaritan faith and married his cousin.
More recently, an American woman has made history by becoming the first person to convert to the Samaritan faith without marrying in.
Originally from Michigan, Sharon Sullivan now lives with her four children within the Samaritan community.
She says it is sad that more people do not know about this ancient religious sect.
"The good Samaritan story is about a Samaritan who is caring for someone not of their own religion," she says.
"And although the title has been used by so many organisations, the people themselves are unknown."
To address this, Ms Sullivan and Benyamin Tsedaka, a Samaritan historian, have spent the past seven years working on an English translation of the Samaritan Torah - one of the world's most ancient religious texts.
UPDATE: That English translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch is now available for preorder from Amazon.com.