Please help save the next generation of Egypt’s Christians

Dear friends of VOICE OF THE COPTS,

 

If you read our pages each day and listen to the news, you will learn quickly about the relentless campaign of terror against the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East — the pillaging, burning, raping, the selling of young Christian girls into slavery, the murdering of souls simply because they are Christian souls.

 

The crimes are unspeakable. Along with many martyred individuals we are seeing the extermination of Christian communities that have stood for centuries.

 

 

Egypt’s Coptic community is one of the largest of Middle Eastern Christians. Their quiet suffering has endured for millennia, but survived they have. However, with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and other militant Islamic groups, we have seen their churches destroyed and their faithful undergo mass persecution. The news media blunts the swords and the West appears helpless or just ignorant as a multitude of Christian lives perish.

 

Copts are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle East.

Ninety-five percent of Copts in Egypt are Orthodox and the remaining population is divided between Catholic and Protestant denominations. Copts living in Egypt represent between 15-20% of the total population of Egypt today.

 

 

 

Many Copts are leaving Egypt just to survive. Even as I write this, they are fleeing anywhere they can to find refuge. Many who have been victims of this persecution and forced to flee are young. Their entire futures are at risk because families have been torn apart or killed and their homes decimated. Some of these young people are children of neighbors or friends from my childhood in Egypt.

 

As you know, my name is Ashraf Ramelah and my organization is VOICE OF THE COPTS. I was born in Egypt and grew up in Cairo. I remember a time when life for Christians there was difficult and full of challenges, but was still free from the reign of terror that has been so recently unleashed on my brothers and sisters and their children, young or unborn. Those days of relative peace are long gone.

 

It is my mission through VOTC, to provide a place of safety and security for fellow Copts, especially the young. We all need to raise awareness, to write and speak out against the persecution of Christians around the globe. There is a growing concern.

 

You can help us now to do more than speak. You can help us develop a solution called CASA FUTURA, supported in part by the European Union. CASA FUTURA is a planned live-in facility in Rome, Italy.

 

 

Casa Futura will be a refuge, a safe haven for some of those who have suffered this terror and whose families have perished. We will help them start a new life in Italy and other European locations and support them as these young people adjust to a safe life in strange countries, but  where they can be free to worship Christ in the way their parents would have wished for them. In a safe environment their Coptic heritage can thrive!

 

We need your help today. I appeal to you to join this life-saving effort.

 

 

Faithfully,