On Holy Ground : A Personal Journey to Old Jerusalem, Where Three of the World’s Great Religions Stake Their Claims, and Each Pilgrim Finds His Own City

For 3,000 years, travelers have journeyed to Jerusalem not just to visit this white-stoned city, but to possess it.

In 1000 BC, King David led an Israelite army from Hebron to take the city from the Jebusites. Later, Nebuchadnezzar marched from Babylon, destroyed Solomon’s temple and exiled the city’s Jewish residents. Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium; Muslims, Crusaders, Turks and, finally, the British all grabbed hold of Jerusalem. One after another laid waste towhat had been erected before them, dividing and organizing the disorder within the walls of the Old City, each layering its Jerusalem atop the Jerusalems of their predecessors’ imaginations.

Today, the Old City of Jerusalem that the generations of conquerors have left for us to view remains a place of layers and divisions, and the many groups that want to possess it stake their claims with stark aggression.

Black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews hope to lay hold to each step and paving stone that insinuates itself down the snaking corridors of the Arab suq, or bazaar--a claim that the most extreme have begun to press with vicious acts of violence. Hassocked priests of six Christian denominations jostle uneasily over rights to maintain the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the sacred shrine to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Palestinian Arabs longing for nationhood press ahead with their five-year uprising against Israeli authority; their intifada , too, brings violence--and, more often, the troubled calm of strikes and shop closings--to the twisting alleyways. This is the peculiar way that three of the world’s great religions treatthis holy city: as if the looming walls confine passions that build relentlessly to the bursting point.

Western visitors tend to travel to Jerusalem with their own passions. In search either of historical understanding or religious fulfillment, we come to the Old City as pilgrims.

rom any approach, the trip is literally an act of ascent.

Mine began last month on the Plain of Nachshon, “where the sun stood still for Joshua,” a companion noted as we drove along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway from the kibbutz midway between the two cities where my sister lives. On this late fall morning, cold enough that I could see my breath, the sun was burning through a thin layer of clouds above fallow fields, offering some hope that the predicted rain--a frequent nuisance for visitors here in fall and winter--might not come after all.

Coming toward Jerusalem from the west, the highway climbs through the Judean Hills.

Dropped off by my friends near the main bus station at the edge of the New City, I boarded a red and white bus of Israel’s ubiquitous Egged fleet, filled with sleepy workers and backpack-toting students, for the ride down Jaffa Road toward the walled city. On this shopping street, signs in Hebrew promoted Sealy Posturepedic mattresses and Eddie Murphy’s “Boomerang,” easily the most advertised film in Israel this fall. “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem,” read the slogan on the map kiosks erected for tourists.

Climbing off the bus, I took the last few twists and turns by foot--no street anywhere in this country, it sometimes seemed, cuts a straight path--and arrived at the Old City’s outer wall.

Old Jerusalem is a classic medieval fortress town; most of these walls were constructed by the Turkish ruler Suleiman the Magnificent about 400 years ago. Amid the bustle of the modern city outside, it was hard to imagine the time when travelers crossed barren land to reach this imposing city limit. Today, construction cranes range around the walls’ exterior, and traditional Jews fight with profit-minded moderns over the fate of 2,000-year-old burial grounds uncovered in excavating for the foundations of a retail complex a stone’s throw to the south.

Up a gently sloping ramp, I walked through Jaffa Gate into the walled city. There are seven gateways through the wall; this is the most tourist-friendly, patrolled by sales agents of half a dozen tour services. For the self-guided visitor it is the perfect starting point because it is the location of the Jerusalem City Museum.

Housed in the Tower of David--where, in the time of Jesus, King Herod built a series of observation posts--the recently redesigned museum’s dioramas and films provide an overview of the city’s history.

The glinting gold of the Dome of the Rock, the premier Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, dominates the walled cityscape. The mosque crowns the Temple Mount, where Solomon in 960 BC and Herod 1,000 years later built temples to the God of the Jews. It was here, tradition says, where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac; it was here that Muslims believe Mohammed ascended to heaven.

To the left, closer by, is the silver crown of the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Beyond the walls are white tombstones climbing the side of the Mount of Olives, where Jews traditionally have sought burial.

The rat-a-tat of jackhammers and the grinding of earthmoving equipment drifted from the New City behind me. But as an olive-clad group of young Israeli soldiers climbed to the viewing platform, the prayers of first one, then a second muezzin began to echo contrapuntally. The sound seemed to come from the Temple Mount and the Muslim Quarter to its north. Over the dirge, church bells began clanging the hour.

This confluence of the modern and the timeless, the Eastern and the Western, the Jewish and Christian and Muslim, envelops Jerusalem. From a height, the blend is peaceful. In the narrow streets below, the traditions battle for the city’s soul.

The night before, I had spoken after dinner with my sister’s friend Richard, who grew up in Burbank but for 12 years has made his home on an Israeli kibbutz. Like Israelis of virtually every political stripe, he is a patriot--to a degree hard to imagine in the more cynical United States, even after the brief military glory and homecoming parades of the Gulf War. So it was with pain that Richard offered warnings about the precautions that must be taken on a trip to the Old City.

During the intifada, unpredictably but often, terrible things have happened within the walls and in other Arab sectors nearby. Indeed, on the morning of my departure from Los Angeles, The Times’ correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Parks, reported on a grenade blast that killed a Palestinian butcher in the Muslim Quarter, sending tourists fleeing the Old City for the day. (Jewish extremists took credit for the killing.) Just hours before my conversation with Richard, an Arab woman stabbed a Jewish student to death within the walls of the ancient city. Eye for eye, nearly 1,100 have died across Israel in the intifada ‘s course. The largest number have been Arabs killed by other Arabs. But no one can go unblinkingly into Jerusalem or the West Bank.

As a licensed tour guide, Richard said he is extremely cautious about visiting the Old City. Chatting as just a friend, he was slightly less foreboding. Richard’s advice was, yes, to glance at the morning headlines, to check with the government tourist office at Jaffa Gate, to never hesitate to question an Israeli officer about the safety of a particular path. Go, he said, but err on the side of safety. Foreign visitors seem to have reached a similar conclusion. Tourism, after collapsing in the months leading to the Gulf War, has recovered and now is up 16% from 1990 levels.

As I began my wandering in the Old City’s maze, the tensions of the intifada had provoked another daylong strike in Arab East Jerusalem, including the walled city. At a junction outside the city, Israeli soldiers had shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who apparently had wandered into a stone-throwing melee as he arrived at school around 7 a.m. In the Old City bazaars, that meant a third or more of the merchants had failed to swing open the iron gates of their shops, and the crowds of tourists were thin.

There are never many visitors to the Old City’s Armenian Quarter, off to the right of Jaffa Gate. It is mostly residential, and I walked quickly around its periphery, peeking into a few open courtyards and admiring the ceramics shops.

Circling back toward the Tower, I headed down David Street, the path into the suq (pronounced shuhk) . The first left turn took me into Christian Quarter Road. Protestants and Roman Catholics are represented in the Old City, but the quarter belongs to the Eastern rites. Wine red-, cobalt blue- and black-robed priests, each with a tall matching hat, command the streets; the convents and churches are marked in the unfamiliar alphabets of the Coptic and Ethiopian churches.

Past the open stores filled with carved olive-wood souvenirs, past the closed stores spray-painted with Jewish stars and ugly graffiti (“Kill Arabs!” or “Kahane Lives,” the latter a reference to the assassinated Brooklyn rabbi whose backers want Arabs forcibly removed from Israel and its occupied territories), down an alleyway on the right, and I came upon the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

What must enter the minds of Christian pilgrims who pass through the nondescript entryway and into the dimness of this Crusader-era building, I wondered. Of these small bundled women in black cloaks and white head coverings who climb the steep stone steps by the door, pause at the station where Jesus, Christians believe, was nailed to the Cross, and then crawl on hands and knees under the altar at the station of the Crucifixion? As they bend, prostrate and kiss the ground of Calvary, what do they see in the light from a score of candelabra?

We did not share a language, so I was left to imagine that these women retrace Jesus’ last steps each morning, just as my routine takes me to kindergarten and preschool and work. They drift silently through the corridors of the church to the final stations of the cross, from the Crucifixion to the site of Jesus’ removal from the cross to the rose-hued sepulcher itself. There, at the center of the church, they duck low to enter the cool vault, bending deeper still to pass into the inner sanctum, light a thin brown candle and witness in their mind’s eye their Lord’s resurrection. To such women, the quarrels of the Coptics and the Syrian Orthodox and the Greek and Armenian priests over this holy building are no distraction. The church is theirs, and no one else’s.

Returning to David Street, I followed the signs to the Cardo, at the heart of the Jewish Quarter.

In reclaiming their quadrant over the 25 years since the Six Day War put the Old City in Israel’s hands, the Jews have taken a much more literal approach to history than their Christian neighbors. Archeological excavations unearthed the remains of the Crusaders’ main market street--and, at the layer beneath it, the main Byzantine boulevard, or Cardo. Enterprising developers have built an enclosed shopping mall, with restaurants and craft shops, into a portion of the ruins, restoring the Cardo to its original purpose, if obscuring its antiquity.

Ineluctably, the suq drew me in deeper. Even without crossing into the Muslim Quarter--and the strike day’s somberness notwithstanding--the Eastern ambience of the bazaar was seductive.

Yes, many of the shops are crammed with kitschy souvenirs, and some of the younger merchants are no less annoying than the hawkers on Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana. But amid the junk are stores brimming with rich fabrics; or handsome Hebron pottery with its deep blues and reds and forest greens; or Yemenite jewelry, well-made leather sandals and sweet spices. More common than insistent salesmen are the quiet, older storekeepers who sit on stools outside their shops, the goods tumbling out of archways and caverns. They drink Turkish coffee and smoke. A small truck clattered by, filling the narrow passageway. Behind it tottered five Arab children in down jackets, none more than 3 years old, chasing the machine and giggling excitedly. There was a row of shuttered storefronts, then one open shop--a video store, adorned with posters for some fleshy Arabic-language adventure film. A right turn down a covered path and I was on an immense, sun-strewn, cobblestoned plaza, facing the Western Wall.

I do not remember my feelings the first time I saw the wall, the sole remnant of the Herodian Second Temple of the Jews, destroyed by the Roman emperor Vespasian in the year 70. I was 18. I remember that I walked up to the wall, where Jews through the centuries have bemoaned their trials and prayed for the temple’s reconstruction (hence it was called the “Wailing Wall” in the centuries that Jerusalem was not in Jewish hands). I recited the Sh’ma, the essential Jewish invocation of God’s oneness.

On my second visit, I was with my 80-year-old grandmother. We had come to Israel to see her 1 1/2-year-old grandson, my sister’s child. We were three generations together at the Wall. My grandmother wore a blue scarf around her head, like a shtetl woman. To me, her craggy face that day and the 2,000-year-old wall--white rock, no more than 50 feet tall and 50 yards long--had an equal portion in Jewish history.

On this day, an extended family of Moroccan Jews was celebrating a 13-year-old’s bar mitzvah. The boy read from a Torah scroll encased in an ornate metal case, according to the North African tradition. He concluded, and the company of men sang to him robustly as he marched with the scroll. The women, separated by custom from the men, offered a yipping ululation of praise. Again, from the mosques on the Temple Mount, Islamic prayers drifted down, mingling with the family’s chorus: Simon tov and mazel tov, they sang, A good omen, good luck .

The bar mitzvah that I had come to Israel to celebrate was some 25 miles away, on the kibbutz where my sister has lived for 15 years. My nephew, Micha, also read confidently from the Torah. My grandmother has passed away. But her son--my father--was there, and his grandson wore the tallit, the fringed prayer shawl that my father wore at his bar mitzvah 57 years earlier in Brooklyn.

Like the Moroccans, we prayed. Like them, we sang: Simon tov and mazel tov . . . .

I had found my Jerusalem.

GUIDEBOOK

The Old City of Jerusalem

Getting to Israel: No one flies nonstop from Los Angeles International Airport to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, but a number of carriers provide connecting service, including British Airways, Delta, KLM, Tower, SAS, TWA and Air France. The best deals often can be found by flying on a European-flag carrier through its home airport; I took KLM through Amsterdam at a bargain rate. El Al--Israel’s national airline, noted for its security precautions--flies three times a week from LAX through New York. As of Dec. 28, advance-purchase round trips with a six- to 21-day stay will cost about $1,100-$1,200.

Getting to Jerusalem: From the airport, you can take a bus operated by Egged, Israel’s local and inter-city bus line, to Jerusalem. A good alternative is a sherut, or shared taxi, which will cost about twice as much but may be more comfortable after a long plane trip. Once you are in the city, numerous bus lines go to the Old City gates, and taxis are inexpensive.

Where to stay: Hotels within the Old City are for only the most dedicated bargain seekers. Many major U.S. chains are represented outside the gates, including Sheraton, Hyatt and Ramada. Two exceptional hotels are the historic King David (011-972-2- 225-111) in West Jerusalem, and the American Colony (011-972-2-282-421) in East Jerusalem.

Where to eat: For wonderful, cheap Middle Eastern food--hummus, tahini, falafel, salads--the place to stop during a visit to the Old City is Abu Shukri, where the Via Dolorosa meets Al Wad Road, the main street in from Damascus Gate. In the New City, long-time residents recommend Cafe Atara on the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall for onion soup and people watching and Kamin on Rabbi Akiva Street for French country cooking.

For more information: Contact the Israel Government Tourist Office, 6380 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1700, Los Angeles 90048, (213) 658-7462.