This Year, a Better Good Friday

Yusef Kaman, a skinny and wispy-mustached Palestinian teenager, offered a brief, wheezing commentary on the Easter season here this year, the first time in five years that Christian pilgrims have descended in large numbers on the holy city.

“These are really heavy!” the 14-year-old said, panting as he lugged a pair of 6-foot wooden crosses down Via Dolorosa, the cobblestoned thoroughfare in the walled Old City that is held by tradition to be the path Jesus Christ took to his crucifixion.

This week marks the first major Christian holiday since the January election of a new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Amid pledges by Israel and the Palestinians to try to find their way back to the bargaining table, the pilgrims, it seems, are coming back as well.

On Good Friday, the faithful turned to Yusef’s father, Ahmed, to rent large crosses to bear on the uphill journey to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The incense-scented basilica is built on the spot that many Christians revere as the site of Christ’s entombment and resurrection.

It was Yusef’s job to lug them back down the hill.

Ahmed Kaman said he had already done more business in four hours than in the last four years. “God willing, better times are ahead for all of us,” he said.

For those whose livelihoods have depended on the flow of tourists to Jerusalem’s holy sites, the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, indeed has been a path of sorrow.

Millennium celebrations at the start of 2000 helped bring more than 2.5 million visitors to Israel, perhaps half of them Christian pilgrims. After fighting broke out between Israel and the Palestinians in September that year, the number of visitors plummeted, eventually falling by nearly two-thirds.

The Israeli Tourism Ministry said visitors had increased by about a third over this time last year, though the numbers still lagged pre-intifada levels. The relative calm in the last two months, though, has reassured many who had put off travel.

“I don’t feel unsafe here at all,” said Aruna Joseph, a pastor’s wife from Madras, India, who was touring the Old City with a group of Tamil-speaking evangelical Christians. “I had been wanting for years to walk this land, and it finally seemed like the right time.”

The Old City was spared much of the fighting of the last 4 1/2 years. Early on in the conflict, however, its cobbled alleyways were the scene of a series of clashes between young Palestinian rock throwers and Israeli forces in full riot gear. Not all tourists were quick to realize the area had become, in effect, a war zone. Combatants near the Via Dolorosa once gaped in amazement when a pair of Japanese pilgrims, Bibles and guidebooks in hand, serenely wandered past.

In Jerusalem, different faiths jostle against one another every day, and Friday was no exception.

While Christians walked the Stations of the Cross, the call to worship rang out from minarets as Muslims hurried to noon prayers on the holiest day of the Islamic week. In the Old City’s Jewish quarter, children scampered about in costumes -- little princesses and biblical warriors -- to mark the festival of Purim, commemorating the salvation of the Jews of Persia.

Israel closed off the Palestinian territories for Purim, which began Thursday and ends Sunday in Jerusalem.

Many Palestinian Christians were able to obtain permits to travel to Jerusalem for Easter week events, but Muslims from the West Bank who wanted to pray at the Old City’s Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, were prevented from making the journey.

Along the Via Dolorosa, tour guides jockeyed for space, calling out commentaries for their charges in Italian, Korean and Tagalog. Palestinian merchants said they welcomed signs of new life in the Old City but wondered whether they would reap the benefits of any tourist windfall.

“If visitors are coming back, it’s good, but we don’t have better lives after all this suffering,” said barber Farid Tubassi, snipping the hair of a small, squirming Palestinian boy. “It is the Israelis who profit.”

At the Ali Baba Internet Cafe, close by the sixth Station of the Cross, proprietor Mohammed Mugrabi said that most of his customers were still local Palestinians, not tourists, “because so many people here are poor and don’t have computers in their home.”

For some visitors, religious considerations weren’t the only draw. Thousands of foreign fans were in town for tonight’s soccer match between Israel and Ireland.

“Truth to tell, I’m a football pilgrim, not the other kind,” said Dennis McSweeney of County Cork, who was making his way toward Via Dolorosa with a tour group.

“But it’s Good Friday and I’m a good Catholic, so here I am.”