Jerusalem Church leaders rally against threat to Armenian property

‘The targeting of one Church is an assault on all, and we cannot remain silent while the foundations of our Christian witness in the land of Christ’s ministry are shaken.’

Christian leaders in Jerusalem wrote to the Israeli government last week urging it to prevent the city’s authorities from seizing property owned by the Armenian Patriarchate.  

They said the move would threaten the centuries-old presence of Christian institutions throughout the Holy Land. In fact, Armenian Christians have lived in Jerusalem for 1,700 years, making it the Christian community with the longest continuous presence in the city.

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem stood in “steadfast solidarity” with the Orthodox Armenian Patriarchate “in its pursuit of justice against an unjust foreclosure order issued by the Municipality of Jerusalem”. The Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches joined with the Armenian Patriarchate to condemn what they called the municipality’s “legally dubious and morally unacceptable” actions.

They found “particularly alarming” the municipality’s attempt to enforce a debt collection without judicial scrutiny, and in defiance of the governmental committee established to negotiate such matters. The Armenian Apostolic Church would be “deprived of the necessary economic resources to live and operate and depriving the local Armenian people of the pastoral care of their Church”.

The patriarchate has denied owing taxes to the authority and filed a legal petition to prevent the confiscation of property it has owned for hundreds of years. The Church leaders said “the targeting of one Church is an assault on all, and we cannot remain silent while the foundations of our Christian witness in the land of Christ’s ministry are shaken”.

In recent weeks around 40,000 Palestinians have fled Israeli military operations across the northern West Bank. Last Sunday, Israeli tanks were deployed in the occupied Palestinian territory for the first time in more than two decades.

The pastor of Bethlehem’s Lutheran Church told Vatican News that the West Bank was experiencing one of its “darkest moments”. The Revd Munther Isaac said: “We see what’s happening in Gaza and we ask – will this be our fate too?”

Israeli settlements and roadblocks, he explained, are cutting built-up areas off from each other and from surrounding villages, turning the West Bank into “a series of open-air prisons”. Around Bethlehem alone, Isaac reported, there are some 80 roadblocks, which often take six or seven hours at a time to cross. He estimated that at least 100 of Bethlehem’s Christian families have left the city over the past 15 months.

Israel and Hamas performed their sixth prisoner swap under the terms of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza last weekend. UNRWA teams in Gaza worked with UNICEF and the World Health Organisation to vaccinate children in the region against polio.

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