Sydney group breaks Holy Land ‘drought’

Sydney
27 July 2003

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Sydney group breaks Holy Land ‘drought’

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By Marilyn Rodrigues

Christians are being urged to return to the Holy Land on pilgrimages lest sacred sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem become mere museums.

Costandi Bastoli says that most Christian Palestinians in the Holy Land rely on tourism for their livelihood.

However, since the escalation of violence there in 2000, travel has virtually stopped and the resulting increase in poverty has contributed to an exodus of Christians.

“We don’t want to see the Holy Land become a museum of places and shrines with no Christian community,” he said.

“If we don’t do something about it now, Christian pilgrimage tours there will not be in place, or we will have to rely on Jewish or Muslim people to lead them,” he said.

Mr Bastoli, who is a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, said that the Christian population in Jerusalem has shrunk from 30,000 in 1944 to 2000, slightly more than one per cent of the city’s population.

“In 1948, the Christian population of the Holy Land was over 18 per cent,” he says.

“In 1999, Fr Salayta, a Roman Catholic priest of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, placed it at less than two per cent.”

Mr Bastoli is leading a pilgrim group from Sydney to Israel in October this year to ‘break the drought” of pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Selina Hasham, of Harvest Pilgrimages, says that it is the first pilgrimage the company has organised to the Holy Land in three years.

“It is the longest break we have had in 20 years of taking people there,” she says.

“When pilgrims stop going to the Holy Land we run the risk of the sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa losing their life and their appeal for Christians.

“It’s the Christian people who keep the holy sites alive.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advises Australians to consider carefully their need to travel to Israel at this time.

It also advises them to stay away from West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

However, Mr Bastoli says that no tourist or pilgrim has ever been the target of an attack in the Holy Land in 20 years; in fact both the Israelis and Palestinians welcome them.

“And things are calming down there at the moment,” he says.

“Even in the Gaza Strip, where pilgrims would not go anyway, things are normal at the moment; they are even taking time to clean graffiti off the walls.”

Ms Hasham says that people who are now staying away out of fear are “missing out on the opportunity to galvanise their faith” by walking and praying where Christ did.

“A pilgrimage to the Holy Land is not just a holiday but an act of solidarity with the Christians in our homeland,” she says.

“It is the homeland of every Christian in that symbolic sense.”