Ahead of Christmas, a towering wooden screen – once covered with soot from millions of worshipers’ candles – is being restored to gilding to glory in the Church of the Nativity, under construction. at the site where many believe that Jesus was born.
But few visitors are expected to see it during the upcoming Christmas holiday season.
Biblical Bethlehem has been troubled since its beginning Coronavirus pandemic nearly two years ago. Christmas is usually the peak tourist season in the traditional birthplace of Jesus, located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In the pre-pandemic era, thousands of pilgrims and tourists from around the world celebrated at the Church of the Nativity and nearby Manger Square.
Israel reopened its borders to vaccination travelers earlier this month, but relatively few are expected to visit Bethlehem this holiday season and not nearly as many as in the pre-pandemic record year. Most tourists visiting Bethlehem fly to Israel because the West Bank does not have an airport.
Many hotels in Bethlehem have closed and shop owners have struggled to stay afloat. Aladdin Subuh, a shop owner whose shop is located just off Manger Square, said he only opened the door for ventilation out of the store.
Palestinian workers prepare a Christmas tree at Manager’s Square, adjacent to the Church of the Nativity, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. (AP Photo / Nasser Nasser)
“It’s almost Christmas and there’s no one there. Imagine that,” he said, surveying a few passersby in hopes of spotting a foreigner in search of a souvenir. “For two years, no business. It’s like dying slowly.”
Although the pandemic has ravaged the Holy Land’s once thriving tourism industry for Israelis and Palestinians, for tourism-dependent Bethlehem the impact has been particularly severe. Israel, the main gateway for foreign tourists, banned most foreign visitors for a year and a half before reopening this month.
Just over 30,000 tourists visited Israel in the first half of November, compared with 421,000 in November 2019, according to the Israeli Interior Ministry.
Majed Ishaq, marketing director of Tourism Palestine, said the Palestinian self-governing government of autonomous regions in the West Bank offers only limited support, in the form of tax exemptions and training programmes. The set. He said the ministry is launching a campaign to encourage Israeli Palestinian citizens to visit Bethlehem and other cities in the West Bank during the holiday season. He added that he expects foreign tourist arrivals to be 10% to 20% of pre-pandemic figures.
Others are not so optimistic.
Part of a refurbished mosaic decorates the Church of the Nativity, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. (AP Photo / Nasser Nasser)
“I don’t think tourism will return any time soon,” said Fadi Kattan, a Palestinian chef and hotelier in the Old City of Bethlehem. The pandemic forced him to close his guesthouse in Hosh Syria in March 2020, and for months he had to let his staff go.
He said reopening before Christmas was not financially and practically feasible, especially in light of the new wave of coronavirus infections sweeping across Europe. He said it would take years to recover the “two-year composite impact” of the pandemic on Bethlehem’s economy – from hotels and restaurants to farmers, grocers and dry cleaners, people who depend on their business,
“In order to reopen in the security sector, we need to see that there is a long-term outlook,” he said.
On a recent day at the Church of the Nativity, the jewel in Bethlehem, a lone group of Italian tourists entered the 6th-century basilica that years before it. COVID-19 There will be a line extending out the door. City workers are starting to post Christmas lights behind them in Manger Square.
The church has undergone a multimillion-dollar overhaul since 2013 organized by a Palestinian presidential committee. It restored the mosaics and gilded marble floors to their former glory and made major structural repairs to the UNESCO heritage site, one of the oldest churches in Christendom.
Tourists pose for photos with restored polished limestone columns, during a visit to the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, West Bank. (AP Photo / Nasser Nasser)
Mazen Karam, director of the Bethlehem Development Fund, said additional work remains to be done, with the team leading some of the restoration work at the church. The project cost $17 million, but Karam said an additional $2 million was needed to refurbish the church’s flagpoles and install a fire suppression and microclimate system.
A separate project by the Greek Orthodox Church to refurbish the soot-encrusted iconostasis – a late 18th-century wooden screen separating the sanctuary from the building’s nave – has been delayed. due to the coronavirus outbreak, but is now nearing completion before Christmas after three years of painstaking work.
“It was a big challenge,” said Saki Pappadopoulos, a woodcarver with Artis, a Greek restoration company that led the project.
But Father Issa Thaljieh, a Greek Orthodox priest at the Church of the Nativity, remains optimistic ahead of the holiday season.
“Thank God, a little bit every day, we could see more groups coming to Bethlehem – not staying in Bethlehem, maybe just to visit – but that is a good sign,” he said, as he stood on a flat bema The church’s recently completed marble, or raised platform. “Bethlehem has no tourists, no people come to Bethlehem, nothing.”
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