JERUSALEM — Yusef Kaman, a skinny and wispy-mustached Palestinian teenager, offered a brief, wheezing commentary on the Easter season here this year, the first time in five years that Christian pilgrims have descended in large numbers on the holy city.
"These are really heavy!" the 14-year-old said, panting as he lugged a pair of 6-foot wooden crosses down Via Dolorosa, the cobblestoned thoroughfare in the walled Old City that is held by tradition to be the path Jesus Christ took to his crucifixion.
This week marks the first major Christian holiday since the January election of a new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Amid pledges by Israel and the Palestinians to try to find their way back to the bargaining table, the pilgrims, it seems, are coming back as well.
On Good Friday, the faithful turned to Yusef's father, Ahmed, to rent large crosses to bear on the uphill journey to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The incense-scented basilica is built on the spot that many Christians revere as the site of Christ's entombment and resurrection.
It was Yusef's job to lug them back down the hill.
Ahmed Kaman said he had already done more business in four hours than in the last four years. "God willing, better times are ahead for all of us," he said.
For those whose livelihoods have depended on the flow of tourists to Jerusalem's holy sites, the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, indeed has been a path of sorrow.
Millennium celebrations at the start of 2000 helped bring more than 2.5 million visitors to Israel, perhaps half of them Christian pilgrims. After fighting broke out between Israel and the Palestinians in September that year, the number of visitors plummeted, eventually falling by nearly two-thirds.
The Israeli Tourism Ministry said visitors had increased by about a third over this time last year, though the numbers still lagged pre-intifada levels. The relative calm in the last two months, though, has reassured many who had put off travel.
"I don't feel unsafe here at all," said Aruna Joseph, a pastor's wife from Madras, India, who was touring the Old City with a group of Tamil-speaking evangelical Christians. "I had been wanting for years to walk this land, and it finally seemed like the right time."
