JERUSALEM — The 163-year-old Austrian Pilgrim Hospice in Jerusalem’s Old City urges prospective guests to “please plan well in advance” — 16 months’ notice for groups.
On Ash Wednesday, four days before Easter, a call to check if the 124-bed guesthouse had space for a day-of reservation met with a different note of caution.
“Yes, there’s space here,” the receptionist said. “But just so you know, you’d be the only guest.”
Large groups of pilgrims should have packed the hospice this week. “Forget Christmas, forget Easter; it’s fully booked,” a long-term guest told me as we huddled in the hotel’s bomb shelter on Thursday.
Normally, the holy season in Jerusalem sees tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims from far-flung countries congregate to retrace the last footsteps and torments of Jesus before his crucifixion. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims typically pray at al-Aqsa Mosque for Eid. Half a million Jews bow their heads at the Western Wall during Passover, also happening this week.
This year, in wartime, the Old City is eerily empty, which is how I found myself as one of the handful of guests at the Austrian hospice, staying in a humble checkered-floor pilgrim room, during Holy Week. Even on the eve of Easter, the front desk offered a low-season rate — 125 euros (about $144) down from 145 euros (about $167).
Citing security issues, Israel closed the holy sites of all three major Abrahamic faiths in recent weeks. The authorities have since permitted some clergy into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and limited batches at the Western Wall. Al-Aqsa Mosque remains completely closed.
On Easter morning, church bells tolled for few ears.
Police have also forced all Old City stores to close, except essential food and grocery shops. Many Old City residents, three-quarters of whom are Palestinian, rely on the high season for their livelihoods and say police’s rationale doesn’t hold up when shops are open right outside the citadel’s stone walls.
Usually, the procession of thousands of Christians performing the 14 Stations of the Cross — tracing Jesus’ last steps along the narrow cobbled path where he is said to have actually taken them — moves through the Via Dolorosa, Latin for “Way of Sorrows,” less like a parade and more like a stop-and-start shuffle. Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Swahili and Filipino echo off the golden Jerusalem stone.
But this Good Friday morning, the stations were hardly paid any visits. Walking the streets were a scattering of friars, a trickle of nuns. A band of six priests — from Spain, Mexico, Germany — walked up to the Via Dolorosa only to be turned away by the police. Later, they sat on the steps of a closed souvenir store, reciting Bible verses aloud.
One small group was finally let through with a police escort: A handful of Franciscan friars stopped at the fourth station outside the Armenian Patriarchate. There were more reporters than clergy: 12 armed officers and 36 journalists looked on as seven men prayed.
Israeli border police have largely closed off the Old City to nonresidents. Stores that violate the order to close face a fine of over 1,000 shekels ($319), shopkeepers said, some shooing away a reporter for fear that even a brief conversation would suggest they were doing business.
“If the police see you in here, I’ll be fined,” Fawad, a souvenir store owner, said, speaking on the condition that he be identified only by first name. The Israeli police did not immediately respond to request for comment.
A candy store owner told me that business has nearly evaporated. “It’s 1 percent,” he said.
Merchandise is “sitting idle, deteriorating, in some cases going to ruin. Everything is ruined. Everything is pointless,” Mohamad Nadeem, 17, said as he shampooed his own hair while standing up at his friend’s barbershop. “Living expenses are high; prices are skyrocketing. It’s really hard, really hard to live in a place like this.”
Israeli authorities have said the Old City restrictions are necessary because of a lack of bomb shelters and streets that are difficult for emergency vehicles to access.
“Some places have red lines,” a friend of a shopkeeper interjected. “Old City has 10 red lines.”
Raed Daen, 60, a baker steps away from Damascus Gate whom everyone in the Muslim Quarter seemed to know and who refused to let me pay for my pita, was one of the few still selling bread. “But there are no people here,” he said.
Outside the New Gate, I asked an Israeli border police officer why exactly everything was closed. He spun his pointer finger like a tornado while making a whirring noise. Then he made the unceremonious sound of a splat. “Missiles,” he said. “You know missiles?” The officer said the stores would be closed today, the next day and a month from now.
In a darkened store selling religious icons, hundreds of pairs of eyes framed in gold leaf stared out at me, the sole customer. The store sells decorative porcelain eggs with painted portraits of the Madonna and Child, wooden Nativity carvings, gem-adorned pectoral crosses.
Rami Mraibe’s steel storefront shutter was open just a crack, which is how I was able to peek in and find him — but only because he was smoking, he said, as he tinkered on an elaborate Byzantine pendant.
If this were a normal holiday, he said, “then sorry, I wouldn’t have time to speak with you,” he told me during a relaxed half-hour sit-down interview. In those times, he opens up extra early, 5 a.m., and closes past 1 a.m. During Orthodox Easter, he sometimes stays open 24/7.
The Americans are plentiful and spend good money — but it’s the Orthodox Christians, particularly the Russians, who are the best customers. “The mentality of the American people is, ‘Oh, I love the piece, I’ll see, I’ll think about it … but the Russians, if you like it … you don’t have to think about it. If you love it, it’s done,” he said.
Property taxes and rent Mraibe pays to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate are high, more than $20,000 annually, he said. Between Easter Sunday and Orthodox Easter, “this two weeks, three weeks, we can close all these bills,” he said.
Tourism is a pillar of Jerusalem’s economy. Some 2.5 million Christians visited Israel in 2019, according to the Tourism Ministry. Said Mraibe, Rami’s brother, said a Jewish friend in the hotel industry told him, “Literally, I quote: Thank you, Jesus, for coming here. If Jesus did not come here, we don’t have business here.”
Earlier in the week, at the Jerusalem Hotel, a Palestinian family-owned business, there were two guests, both reporters, one Italian and one American.
It’s like this every war — tourists check out, and journalists file in, said the hotel’s owner, Raed Saadeh. When tourists stopped booking during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, he said, “I was able to attract some journalists only because I decided to buy a fax machine.”
This year, the hotel was meant to be full of guests paying a premium to stay by the Old City as it glows with activity during Ramadan, Saadeh said. Its restaurant had group reservations lined up for iftars. But 10 days into the holy month, when the war began and al-Aqsa closed, “all of that vanished.”
Muslims, still barred from al-Aqsa, have prayed on streets outside the city’s walls as close as possible to the mosque, including on Eid, when Israeli police dispersed them with stun grenades.
Every couple of minutes on Easter morning, someone walked past the metal barricade to the unguarded back entrance of the Holy Sepulchre, where it is believed Jesus was crucified and resurrected. Facing the locked heavy wooden door, some prayed silently; others, perhaps hoping for a miracle, tried gently to push it open.
Adeeb Joudeh, keys custodian of the Holy Sepulchre, was walking through the Christian Quarter in a suit that morning. Part of the Palestinian Muslim family entrusted with the key for generations to avoid tensions among Christian denominations, Joudeh can open the door, but almost nobody comes in, he said. “The situation is very bad.”
Terry Nguyen, 23, had bought tickets to Israel from the United States for Holy Week. When his flight was canceled because of the war, he used the refund to reroute to Cairo, determined to reach Jerusalem in the Saint Francis jubilee year. Nguyen said he had some second thoughts about coming but decided to press on.
“I have radical trust in God,” he said, “so what happens is what he wants.” Just being in the city during the Holy Week is a blessing, he said.
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