Exploring Jerusalem, the holy city of three religions

JERUSALEM — A river of people flooded the narrow street in front of my hotel. Filipinos carrying wooden crosses marched through singing a hymn in Tagalog, some in tears. A troupe of Germans in red baseball caps walked by carrying palm fronds. Men shoving hand-carts yelled in Arabic: "Make way! Make way!" Shoulder to shoulder, they streamed through Jerusalem's Old City doing business, running errands, looking for redemption.

Every time I stepped into the daily fray, I had a moment like this. Going from the quietness of the Hashimi Hotel — with its rooftop terrace and polite Muslim clerks — into the hectic flow of the ancient city was like going from one element to another. It was the feeling of standing on the shore, solid and known, and then jumping into the water, something unknowable and liquid.

In Jerusalem, like much of Israel, every square inch of the stony ground is covered in blood and history, hopes and prayers, perdition and redemption. For each traveler and every resident, the history is different, the map is different, the truth is different. Those truths often collide, putting Jerusalem at the center of dozens of wars during the past 3,000 years.

In the face of every heart-rending dispute, the idea of this city's holiness endures. It doesn't matter how arduous the journey, how daunting the violence or how hot the anger — the pilgrims come. For as long as there has been a Jerusalem, there have been people intent on getting there.

The Old City is a maze: Three- and four-story buildings line the narrow streets, which seldom run straight for more than a few hundred yards. There are no cars; there is no room for them. About 35,000 people live inside the stone walls, completely intact and about a half-mile long on a side. Seventy percent of the people inside the Old City are Muslim, 20 percent are Christian and 10 percent are Jewish. All of them rely on pilgrims, tourists and travelers to keep the neighborhood's economy buzzing.

Christians' church

I walked about 10 minutes from my hotel to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was Palm Sunday, and the small courtyard in front of the church was packed.

I could hardly tell I'd arrived at one of the most important shrines in Christianity. There is no grand vista, not even a clearly defined structure. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is an amalgamation of buildings and additions from different eras and sects that merges with the stone walls of the buildings around it.

Inside, a column of light from the opening in the dome pierced the haze of incense floating above Christ's tomb, a stone structure as big as a small house that sits where the original grotto is thought to have been. A pounding noise rang out, metal on stone — crack, crack, crack — and the Muslim keepers of the church keys strode into the rotunda, dividing the crowd as they hammered their metal-tipped canes on the hallowed rock. Behind them came Franciscan monks in brown robes, Catholic pilgrims and a group of Greek Orthodox worshippers.

It was reassuring to know that in some respects, Jerusalem's spiritual factions can get along; several generations of the same Muslim family have been keeping order at the Church — and peace between Christian sects — since an 1852 agreement known as the Status Quo. And soon voices rose in song in the church.

Near the entry, a flight of steps leads to the top of what many Christians believe is the exact spot of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, where Christ was crucified. Pilgrims knelt to touch a tiny patch of exposed stone under an ornate altar. One after another, they walked away with tears in their eyes.

Judaism's wall

Visiting Jerusalem

Safety

• Travel to the Middle East requires careful introspection. Injury to tourists in Israel and Jordan — the two most common destinations for American travelers — has been rare. But tourists have been injured in suicide bombings and other attacks, and assessing your comfort level is wise.

• A State Department Travel Warning is in effect for Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The warning pertains to fighting in Gaza and to the recent war between Israel and Lebanon. "The security situation in northern Israel has improved," it says, "but the situation remains tense and a possible resumption of sporadic violence can't be ruled out." Details: www.travel.state.gov or 888-407-4747.

• In Jordan, a man opened fire at the Roman amphitheater in downtown Amman in September, killing a British tourist and wounding six others. The State Department has not issued a travel warning specific to Jordan.

• I traveled to Israel and Jordan in April. In Jerusalem I stayed in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. There and in Jordan, I felt safe and welcome. I wouldn't hesitate to go back, even after the recent Israel/Lebanon war.

Resources

• An even-handed primer on the history of Jerusalem is "Jerusalem/One City, Three Faiths" (Karen Armstrong, Ballantine Books, 482 pages, $17.95). It's in-depth and was updated in 2005.

• There is a shortage of fresh guidebooks on the region. One of the best is Eyewitness Travel Guides' "Jerusalem and the Holy Land," updated in 2002. (Multiple authors, 304 pages, $20).

Tours

Most religious pilgrims will go with a group organized by a church, synagogue or mosque. But there are general tour operations available from a wide variety of venues. A good place to start wandering the Web in search of them is www.sacred-destinations.com, a compendium of pilgrimage possibilities, with an informative section on the Holy Land.

Israel tourism information

The government tourism office: www.goisrael.com or 888-77-ISRAEL.

In my imagination, Jerusalem was a vast city; the reality was quite the opposite. It took only 15 minutes to walk from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the most revered site in Judaism, the Western Wall.

It was a sunny afternoon, and I was in the company of guide Gil Daleski, a native of Jerusalem. Before we could see the Western Wall, we had to pass through a metal detector and a pat down. Two guards made a careful inventory of my camera bag.

"The security is heavy here," Daleski said. "... That's because if anything happens here, it can make the whole world burn."

We passed onto a blindingly white stone plaza, facing the towering wall, where Jews have worshipped since ancient times. At least 20 Israeli soldiers armed with machine guns paced slowly through the knots of people gathered on the plaza, watching everything from behind dark sunglasses.

The ancient Western Wall is part of the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, a small hill. In the Jewish tradition, that hill is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, Daleski said.

On top of it was the site of the original Temple, the most revered landmark of the Jewish faith built almost 3,000 years ago. For some Jews, the Temple — demolished, rebuilt and demolished again — marked the very place where the world began and the very place where it will end.

Now the top of the Temple Mount is occupied by the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, significant Islamic holy sites.

"It's important to understand that we don't even have any ruins of the Temple. Nothing remained," Daleski said. "The Temple itself is the most important and holy place. But that's where the Dome of the Rock is now, so what can we do? The wall is the most holy place available."

The wall is just that: a span of light-colored stone blocks. The worship area is cordoned off and divided into men's and women's sides. People of all faiths can approach the wall, but visitors are asked to cover their heads with a hat, yarmulke or scarf. People stood with their faces pressed to the massive blocks of stone, quietly saying their prayers. Others carefully folded written prayers and wedged them into the cracks between the massive blocks of stone.

Islamic holy places

The next morning, I retraced my steps. To get to the most holy Islamic landmarks in Jerusalem, a non-Muslim must return to the Western Wall, and pass through an even more rigorous security check to get onto the plaza that is on top of it, and Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa, Arabic for "The Far Mosque."

In the Islamic world, al-Aqsa is linked to the life of the prophet Muhammad and third in importance behind Mecca and Medina.

I'd grown used to the narrow streets and crowds of the Old City; being in a wide-open, elevated space was a novel sensation. I walked to the center of the plaza, where my eyes were drawn to the beauty of the building that dominates the space, the Dome of the Rock. It is a singular achievement of world architecture — a rhythmic balance of angle and curve that was centuries ahead of its time 1,300 years ago. Its gold dome, rising above the octagonal base, looked particularly lustrous against the pure blue of the spring sky. By comparison, the Aqsa Mosque at the other end of the plaza, with its gray dome and long arcaded front, was a quiet presence.

Families rested beneath cedar and olive trees, and tourists wandered with their cameras. However, the interiors of the monuments are closed to non-Muslims; The ongoing conflict between Israelis and Muslims brings bitter feelings close to the surface.

A slender, elderly man introduced himself as a guide and gave his name only as Abu Khader, which means father of Khader.

We sat on a bench under a cedar tree, facing the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa were built in the late 600s, he said, after Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim forces and only a few years after the prophet Muhammad's death.

Al-Aqsa is held in special reverence because of the prophet's "Night Journey." Abu Khader said that one night in Mecca, as the prophet slept, he was awakened by the angel Gabriel, who took him to a winged-creature called Al-Buraq that carried him to Jerusalem. The prophet met with other prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and then ascended to heaven. It was on this journey that Muhammad received instructions about making five prayers a day, Abu Khader said.

A sacred city

I ended each day on the fourth-floor roof terrace of the Hashimi Hotel. It was a full-moon week, and each night as the sun set, the moon rose from behind the Mount of Olives. From the terrace, I listened to the call to prayer — Allah being praised in a dozen voices from a dozen different minarets — and watched the lights come on in a thousand windows.

From that vantage point, it was easier to see Jerusalem as one sacred city, and not a place of competing realities and simmering resentment. From the rooftop, the people in the windows were just people making dinner — not Jews, Muslims or Christians.

The stones of Jerusalem have been sanctified in prayer in nearly every language on Earth. Hope for the future lies in recognizing that those prayers have much in common, no matter who gives them voice.