Jerusalem’s Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III, has threatened to close the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to protest Israel’s freezing of the Patriarchate’s bank accounts in a dispute over water bills backdated 15 years, when the supply was taken over by a new company, Hagihon .
The Patriarchate owed the city’s municipality nine million shekel ($2.3 million) since it sidestepped a centuries’ old payment exemption on places of worship and started billing the church for water.
Patriarch Theophilos is threatened with the church doors being shut in several days, if Israeli authorities do not lift a bank freeze on the Patriarchate’s account.
General Secretary of the Patriarchate, Archbishop of Constantina Aristarchos, said the church is willing to pay water bills from now on, but that the accumulated debt would be problematic.
“We trust God and hope that people will help us,” he said, adding that the Patriarchate has sent letters to Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv stated that for many decades now there has been a tacit agreement between the church and a former mayor of Jerusalem, exempting the Patriarchate from paying for water piped to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Patriarchate is now unable to pay priests’ wages, Archbishop Atallah Hanna told Al-Mayadeen. The church, inside Jerusalem’s Old City, encompasses Golgotha, or Calvary, where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and the tomb where he was buried and resurrected. It definitely constitutes the most revered site of Christianity.
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