Party Faithful Make Trek to Holy Land

There were reverent prayers, candlelight vigils and mostly raucous partying as pilgrims, tourists and the curious gathered on the Mount of Olives early today to celebrate the dawn of 2000.

Anyone here to greet the second coming of Christ was keeping a low profile. Acting on fears that apocalyptic Christians might wreak havoc in the Holy Land, Israeli authorities imposed a blanket of security throughout Jerusalem that seemed to keep trouble to a minimum.

Hundreds of people from all over the world milled about on a Mount of Olives ridge overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City. The golden Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher glistened on the horizon as bursts of fireworks, mostly from nearby Bethlehem, dotted the star-filled sky.

“Happy New Year and God bless you,” said Anna McGill, a 22-year-old law student from Australia. “This is the most religious place that can be. It is very powerful. But really I’m here to see a bunch of crazy people.”

Despite weeks of hype and expectation, the handful of evangelical Christians meditating here was far outnumbered by journalists and police who came to keep tabs. No one attempted to commit mass suicide or trigger Armageddon, as some predicted.

Instead, celebrators were popping champagne corks, smoking cigars and chatting on their cell phones. One group of festive Finns was doing the wave.

“Are you going to the Church of the Ascension?” asked a woman in the crowd, referring to the site at the top of the mount where Christ is said to have risen to heaven.

“Is there a party there?” responded her companion.

The religious significance was not lost on everyone.

“This is the center, where the three great Semitic religions were born,” said longhaired, long-bearded Shawn Olson, 28, of Alexandria, Minn. “I don’t share those beliefs, but this is the place to be.”

At the Church of All Nations in the Garden of Gethsemane, the site on the mount where Jesus is believed to have prayed before his arrest, hundreds of Roman Catholics attended Mass and then marched through the streets holding candles and torches.

“We are here together to say hello to the new year and hello to Jesus,” said Franco Ghetti, a 42-year-old teacher from Italy. “Jesus is everywhere. He does not have to come back because he is already with us.”

Israeli authorities--caught between the need to ensure public safety and guarantee freedom of religious expression--did their best to dampen millennial spirits by deporting and arresting Christian pilgrims whom they considered a potential danger.

Miki Levi, Jerusalem’s acting police commander, said Friday that dozens of visiting Christians were arrested in the last few weeks on suspicion of planning to commit mass suicide or otherwise disturb the peace.

A spokeswoman later clarified that the number was about 20 to 30 and said that, while the pilgrims were considered eccentric, they were not judged to be members of dangerous cults. Some were placed under psychiatric care or will be deported, police said.

Israel had been nervous for the better part of a year about the possibility of doomsday cults infiltrating the region’s holy sites in a conspiracy to provoke the end of the world. Members of one group, the Denver-based Concerned Christians, were arrested by Israeli police and deported in January 1999 in what police dubbed Operation Walking on Water.

More than 12,000 police were deployed Friday and today to prevent violence. During Ramadan prayers earlier Friday at the revered Al Aqsa mosque, police wearing bulletproof vests and armed with automatic rifles manned roofs and the stone ramparts of the Old City while helicopters circled overhead. One fear was that a crazed Christian might attack Muslim worshipers as part of a biblical prophecy, lighting a tinderbox of tension in this disputed holy city.

Instead, huge crowds of Muslim worshipers, Orthodox Jews in long black coats hurrying to their own Sabbath prayers and Christian tourists in everything from shorts to priestly robes mingled through the city’s tiny, bustling streets without incident.

The precautions, the arrests and concern about crowds and other Y2K disruptions slowed the flow of tourists arriving in Jerusalem for what officials had hoped would be a bumper season. Hotel operators reported numerous cancellations--some by Christian groups that reported they couldn’t get visas--and the government’s Tourism Ministry said hotel occupancy was running well below last year’s holiday season.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s minister in charge of public security, said this week that authorities who have received special training about Christianity and about mental health were attempting to act in as sensitive a manner as possible.

Up on the Mount of Olives, residents said police have been scouring the area for weeks in search of dangerous or overwrought Christian pilgrims.

The Mount of Olives is the plateau east of Jerusalem where Jesus is believed to have spent much of his adulthood. It is the site from which 4th century Christians judged that Jesus ascended to heaven near a cave that is now the Church--and the Mosque--of the Ascension. The site is located, conveniently, next to the Mount of Olives Hotel and across the street from the Mount of Olives hummus and souvenir shop.

Three leading monotheistic faiths--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--give credence to the belief that Judgment Day and the coming of the Messiah will take place on the Mount of Olives, signaled by an earthquake, a splitting-in-two of the mountain or a trumpet and choir of angels.

Rania Sbetan, a Palestinian Muslim who works at the Mount of Olives Hotel, recounted the passages of the Koran that speak of Jesus returning to Earth. But she viewed the commotion in her biblical neighborhood with a mixture of awe and skepticism.

“I know the TV cameras are waiting for him and all these people think they will meet him, but I think it will be difficult to know him,” she said. “I think this is part miracle and part joke.”