The Maronite community held today events to honour Saint Maroun, father of the Maronite Church, who died 1,600 years ago.

Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir and top government officials commemorated the event in Saint George’s Church, in Beirut. President Michel Suleiman, Speaker Nabih Berri, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and several cabinet ministers, MPs and politicians, including Lebanese forces’ leader Samir Geagea.

“Our visit today bears a historic importance since it sets a new track to revive true Eastern Christian culture because the Christian church originated from here," Aoun said.

The neighborhood Wadi Abu Jamil in downtown Beirut is empty and quiet these days. But back in the old days it used to be a bustling place known as Beirut's Jewish neighborhood. 

It is where the Jewish physician Dr. Shams was said to treat patients who suffered economically for free and where, at night, people from the neighborhood gathered at the house of one of the Jewish families to watch television because they were the only ones in the area who had one at the time.

But after multiple Arab-Israeli wars, Israeli invasions and Lebanese Hezbollah's 2006 war with the Jewish state, Dr. Shams and most of the other Jewish families from "The Valley of the Jews," as the neighborhood also was called, are long gone.