Mount Gerizim, West Bank - There are two ways to look at the journey Wada Cohen took to the south of Ukraine a few years ago. Both are told in this remote hilltop village that is one of the last outposts of the biblical sect known as the Samaritans.
In one version, whispered among the women who gather on street corners to gossip the afternoon away, Mr. Cohen was a lonely man who couldn't find a local woman, forced to look for companionship at a faraway marriage agency. In the other, told by his approving father and some of the other village elders, Mr. Cohen's journey to meet and bring back a bride named Alexandra Krasyuk may just save the Samaritans from extinction.
For millennia, the Samaritans - descendants of the ancient Israelites who practise their own religion based on the Torah - have been slowly dying away, their numbers diminishing to exactly 701 today. Half of them live here on the rocky foothills of Mount Gerizim, a craggy outcrop that looms over the chaotic West Bank town of Nablus.
The Samaritans' numbers have dwindled because of an ancient tradition of marrying only within the community, a strictly observed rule that led to a dwindling gene pool and a rising number of birth defects. The streets of this village are filled with dark-haired young men and women with malformed limbs, twisted faces and speechless tongues.
"There are a lot of cases of birth defects, because our genes are so close," said Rym Samiri, a 33-year-old health worker. She said she has two healthy daughters despite being married to her cousin, but she knows she is lucky.
"I have two sisters who are mute because my father is married to my cousin. Eighty per cent of the people are handicapped."
Into this sick and dying community have stepped two Slavic women who may as well have arrived from a different planet, Alexandra from Ukraine, and Lena, an Israeli citizen born in Omsk, on the plains of faraway Siberia.
Their admittance into the previously closed society of the Samaritans is nothing short of a revolution, one that was launched by the sect's high priest, Elazar Ben Tzadaka. Shortly after he rose to the position five years ago as a result of the death of his more conservative predecessor, he decreed that generations of intermarrying had left the Samaritans with too small a gene pool to survive.
Marriages to outsiders - which once meant expulsion from the Samaritan faith - are now encouraged in an effort to reduce the birth defects that plague the community. The only condition he set was that outsiders be made to spend six months living in the community before the marriage so that there would be no misunderstandings about what the newcomer was getting into.
"I looked at the situation of the Samaritans and I saw that the rate of [birth defects] was on the increase and realized it was because of blood and marriages to close relatives. As head of the sect, I had to find ways for us to survive and continue," he said, speaking in a slow, measured tone that hinted at his past as a schoolteacher. "I now recommend not marrying anyone who is close to you, who is a family relative."
To explain his decision, he points to his own family. When he was a young man, High Priest Elazar's father decreed that he should marry his cousin. It was a mistake, he says now. Two of his three sons were born deaf and mute. Two others died. Mr. Cohen is his only healthy child.
With his son, the genial, white-bearded cleric went through a catalogue sent by the Ukrainian marriage agency and helped his son pick out the slim and pretty Alexandra, hoping she would bear him healthy grandchildren.
"Samaritans cannot challenge science. Science has proven that it is wrong to intermarry. We should not be strangers to the wider world."
Alexandra, now Ms. Cohen, lives with her husband and his family in the High Priest Elazar's house. Blond and dressed in a jean skirt and tight red sweater, she sticks out as different in every way from the dark-featured, modestly dressed community into which she's moved.
Ms. Cohen said she didn't know anything about the Samaritans before she arrived here in 2003. Speaking in Russian, which no one else in the family understands, she explained that the 45-year-old Mr. Cohen had told her that he was Israeli when they first met in her hometown of Gherson, on the Black Sea coast. Just 19 at the time, she said she moved to the Middle East on the understanding that she was following the well-worn path of Ukrainian Jews moving to Israel.
"At the start it was very difficult, but now I've gotten used to it," she said, taking a break from an afternoon of doing household chores while her husband sat and read the newspaper. "They have different traditions here. It's not like home."
Mr. Cohen, who describes himself as a petrol trader, looks up from his newspaper to describe his spouse in Arabic that she can't understand as "the best wife in the world." (The two speak Hebrew to each other.) But he assigns a member of the community to travel with her everywhere she goes.
Ms. Cohen, who says she badly misses her parents - and hints that they're worried about her living in the West Bank - goes home to Ukraine for three weeks every year with her husband. Many in the Samaritan community are worried that one time soon she'll decide not to come back to Gerizim.
There's a lot riding on women such as Ms. Cohen staying and learning to live happily among the Samaritans. Despite the culture clash, High Priest Elazar said her arrival has the potential to save a disappearing way of life.
"A lot of people think we will become extinct some day, that we will vanish. But now we are on the increase," the high priest said, sitting on a shaded bench on the veranda of his family's home, looking at his unconventional daughter-in-law with apparently genuine affection.
Long before the high priest made his decision on intermarriage, the women in town knew something was going wrong with their babies and were struggling to quietly deal with it. When one of them hits the four-month mark in their pregnancy, she's taken by the others to the hospital in Holon, an Israeli town that is home to the other half of the Samaritan population, for an ultrasound.
Gathered in a semicircle of plastic chairs to gossip during a religious holiday this week, the women of Mount Gerizim spoke guardedly of the ordeals they've gone through because of the tradition of intermarrying.
Among the eight women and their daughters are a brunette and a redhead who are dubbed "the twins" because of their matching pinched faces, and two others who are deaf. The group is joined by a single male, a mentally handicapped 21-year-old who leans heavily on a metal walker and makes several failed attempts to introduce himself.
"If [the child] is only deaf and mute, he can stay. It's not allowed by God to have a miscarriage," one of the women explained. "But if he cannot live ..." Her voice trails off without finishing the thought and the women change the topic and refuse to return to it.
Most of the women welcome the arrival of women such as Alexandra and Lena into the community, and the end of the imposed intermarriages. But some in town see the outsiders as a threat to the Samaritan way of life.
Even at the time that the apostle Luke recorded Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, a man who stopped to help a stranger in distress whom others had walked by, the Samaritans were an ostracized community. A Samaritan was likely chosen to be the hero of the fable for exactly that reason - a centuries-old anti-racism message.
Today, they still keep to themselves as much as possible. Neither fully Palestinian nor Israeli, they are Arabic speakers who live in the West Bank but celebrate Passover. Approximately 350 live in Gerizim, at the foot of the mountain Samaritans believe to be the holiest place in the world. They believe it is here, not Jerusalem, that God's holy temple will be built.
In the house of 59-year-old Fathi al-Teef, the laws of the Samaritan religion - which can be described as an extremely orthodox breakaway sect of Judaism - are strictly observed.
As in all Samaritan homes, a woman who is menstruating is considered impure and cannot come into contact with anyone for seven days. His 27-year-old daughter, Najla, who just had a miscarriage, must now sit only in her own chair and drink from a special plastic cup for a 40-day stretch, as defined by Samaritan laws.
"I'm against this marrying of Russian women or any others. Their traditions are very different from ours," Mr. al-Teef said, promising that he will go to great lengths to make sure that his own bachelor son marries within the community. Birth defects, he said, are part of life and occur in every part of the world.
"The most important thing in religion is purity, and women are half of religion. I'm worried that these women brought up in Eastern Europe will not commit themselves to the laws of the Samaritans."
His views are common here, though High Priest Elazar says no one has yet questioned his decision to his face. The controversy, however, lightens with the arrival of a healthy newborn Samaritan. Eighteen months ago, Lena and her husband, Raghai, gave birth to a son, Adam.
Even the most conservative of Mount Gerizim's gossipers can't hide their delight at seeing their numbers grow. It is, the local residents say, the first "new Samaritan" born in 3,600 years.
"He is a Samaritan, 100 per cent," Mr. al-Teef said, his harsh words for the boy's mother suddenly forgotten. "It's a gift from God."