| A difficult Easter for Holy Land Christians 04/13/2001 Religion News Service JERUSALEM - Every year on Holy Saturday (April 14), the day before Easter, Palestinian Christians celebrate the ancient ceremony of the fire, symbolizing the enduring spirit of the Resurrection.
A flame from the ancient Church of the Holy Sepulcher is passed by torch to community representatives from around Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The flame is carried far and wide to the region's most remote parish communities.
This year, however, few Palestinians will make it to the holy city for the ceremony because of the continuing Israeli blockade on West Bank and Gaza roads and communities.
Instead, many local Christian communities will stage their own fire ceremonies, marching through the streets, or in churches, with torches and candles symbolizing the light of the risen Jesus, said the Rev. Raed Abusahlia, chancellor of the Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarchate in Jerusalem.
On Palm Sunday, the grinding impact of the Israeli closure on Palestinian life was already evident, Abusahlia said. Last year, in the wake of Pope John Paul II's visit to the region, some 30,000 local and foreign Christians participated in the march from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem's Old City, along the route of Jesus' triumphant procession.
This year, a mere 3,000 Christians were on hand, and, now, Abusahlia is preparing a video of the event to be circulated among the parish communities that missed out.
"During the pope's visit last year, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert repeatedly talked about how Israel has guaranteed free access to Jerusalem and its holy places for all of the three religions,'' said Abusahlia.
"Reviewing those speeches recently for an album of the pope's visit, I had to laugh. What kind of free access is there if Jerusalem is open to Israelis and tourists, but not to the Muslims and Christians living just a few miles away?
"What kind of religious freedom is there if you have to get a permit to come to church during Holy Week?''
But access to religious sites is only the tip of the iceberg of problems faced by the Christian community here as they approach Easter Sunday.
Dozens of families in the Christian village of Beit Jallah, in the Bethlehem area, have been forced to leave their homes because of the intermittent Israeli bombing of the village in response to Palestinian sniper fire on the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo.
The tourism industry and related services, which most of the 12,000 Christians of Jerusalem and the 30,000 Christians of Bethlehem depend on heavily for a livelihood, remains hobbled.
"Eighty percent of the people working in the tourism sector are now unemployed. That includes the guides and restaurants, souvenir craft industries, bus companies and hotel employees,'' Abusahlia said.
The Christian-owned Gloria Hotel and Knights Palace, whose 300 rooms were full to capacity last year, can boast only about 20 guests this season. Among its 70 employees, only 15 to 20 are still working in the institutions that are prominent fixtures of Jerusalem's Old City Christian Quarter. Everyone else has been laid off.
Since the start of the recent intifada last September, nearly $1 million has been collected by Catholic relief organizations in the Holy Land for food and medical supplies.
The money is distributed to Christians and Muslims alike, said the Rev. Guido Gockel, regional director for Pontifical Mission, an aid organization linked to the New York-based Catholic Near Eastern Welfare Association.
"What has been given is actually far more than what I had expected,'' he said. According to figures published by UNESCO, some $36 million in aid has reached the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza from combined government and nongovernmental relief efforts. But that is still a drop in the bucket against the more than $8 million a day lost by the Palestinian economy because of the present crisis.
"The greatest need is that people have no work,'' Gockel said.
In cities and remote villages, creeping poverty is having a significant impact on children, said Father Louis Hazboun, the parish priest in the predominantly Christian village of Zababde. The village, nestled in the northern highlands of the West Bank, boasts a Byzantine-era church, one of the oldest in the Holy Land.
"When I visit homes, I'll often see children drinking tea rather than milk,'' he said. "Many people have had their phone service cut, and many are fearful they will lose their electricity and their water because they can't pay the bills.''
Zababde, which is surrounded by Muslim communities, is noted for its highly educated population, including dozens of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and jurists. The parish operates a large and successful elementary school and high school, which draw some 8,000 Muslim and Christian students from the surrounding area.
Yet many of those students can no longer afford the tuition fees, Hazboun said. Rather than expelling the students, Hazboun has scrambled to raise private donations through his own network of Christian contacts abroad to pay at least some of the tuition, which in turn funds teachers' salaries.
"I collect what I can through the generosity of friends,'' he said. "But in the end it is Providence that provides.''
Abusahlia, however, is perturbed by the increasing dependence of Palestinians on outside aid, which he feels can create an unhealthy relationship, even in these difficult times. And so he recently launched a new kind of self-help relief effort via an Internet Web site.
Through the site, he is raising money to buy cows, sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits for local Palestinians, particularly those living in rural areas. The program is dubbed "Cows for the Poor, Calves of Blessing.''
"One cow, which costs about $1,000 to purchase, can provide a family with about 30 liters of milk morning and evening, which yields an income of about $12 a day,'' the priest said. "Of that daily income, I ask the families to set aside $2 for the poor, so that people learn to give charity, and not just become the recipients.''
So far, Abusahlia said, he has raised over $10,000 for the program, which began just a few weeks ago.
Because of their rural lifestyle, life in some of the more remote Christian villages, like Zababde, may be more tolerable for Christians today than the cities, said Hazboun, a sociologist by training, who originally hails from the more urbanized Bethlehem area.
"The families here are still extended families, who live collectively,'' he said. "People here are still attached to the land, and they work the land rather than selling it off for real estate. So they at least have olives, oil and goat's cheese in abundance.
"While Christians from the Bethlehem area are emigrating, people from Zababde are staying put. Villages like these, I think, are the hope of the Christians in the Holy Land.''
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