Waving palm fronds, thousands of Christians from around the world celebrated Palm Sunday, walking the path they believe Jesus rode on his
donkey as he entered Jerusalem days before his crucifixion.
The procession with the top Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, Patriarch Michel Sabbah, started at the Bethphage Church, where tradition says Jesus mounted the donkey. Participants walked up to the Mount of Olives, then down to the ancient stone walls of the Old City.
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Marching pilgrims strummed guitars, some of them wearing "I love Jesus" shirts, as they braved unseasonable heat in an early Jerusalem springtime.
Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus' followers shaking branches to greet him as he entered the holy city. The festivities mark the start of Holy Week when, according to the New Testament, Jesus was betrayed by Judas, crucified and then resurrected on Easter Sunday.
"It gives you a chance to actually feel what Christ went through, because it's a steep hill," said Norman Dsilva, 47 and a financial analyst from Concord, New Hampshire in the U.S. as he waited for the walk to begin.
Michelle Alignay, 28, a preschool teacher from San Diego, California, was
visiting the Holy Land for the first time.
"All your life you grow up learning, and now I am finally able to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and see where it all happened," Alignay said. "It wasn't just a story."
Even some Jewish Israelis joined the procession this year as part of a course they are taking called Between Judaism and Christianity. Their Hebrew mixed with the Arabic of the Palestinian teenage scouts from the West Bank city of Ramallah in the courtyard of the Bethphage Church as they waited for the patriarch to arrive.
Israel granted the Palestinian scouts special permission to enter Jerusalem for the festivities. For many years, during the height of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, they were not allowed in, the scouts said.
Some pilgrims said they were wary of coming, concerned by recent bloodshed, including a Palestinian shooting attack on the Mercaz Harav religious school in Jerusalem in which eight students were killed, as well as violence in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel.
"It's amazing to be here," Ramallah resident Alexandra Nafi, 20, said after she applied lipstick in a corner of the cobblestone churchyard. "But we are afraid a little bit in general because of the violence. I feel like something is going to happen any minute."
Taxi drivers said Sunday the number of tourists showed that few had been
scared away by the violence. The fighting that began in 2001 seriously damaged the local tourism industry, but it has rebounded in recent years.
Christians believe that Jesus stopped in Bethany at the house of a leper on his way to Jerusalem.
Sitting in the Bethphage Church's anemone-speckled field as a border police jeep sped by along the cement wall, tourist Maria Irene, 76, said she was making the procession with her sister for their 13th time.
"Jesus is here. Here he saved humanity," said Irene, a retired doctor from Porto in northern Portugal. "At home we pray every day for peace in Israel."
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