Custody of the Holy Land

The Monastery of Saint Saviour (Hebrew: מנזר סן סלוודור) is a Catholic Franciscan monastery located on 1 Saint Francis Street, east of the New Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The site was purchased from the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1560 with permission of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire, and the monastery was constructed in stages. The church building was erected in 1885, with renovation in 1985. The site includes a printing press, an organ workshop, a library and a Catholic school.

The Monastery of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel was founded and raised in 1312 in Jerusalem by King Milutin. It is located within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem (Holy Land), near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Church of the Resurrection of Christ) and the Greek Patriarchate.

The New Gate (Arabic: باب الجديد Bāb ij-Jdïd) (Hebrew: השער החדש HaSha'ar HeChadash) is the newest of the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was built in 1889 to provide direct access between the Christian Quarter and the new neighborhoods then going up outside the walls. The arched gate is decorated with crenelated stonework. The New Gate was built at the highest point of the present wall, at 790 metres (2,590 ft) above sea level.

The Co-Cathedral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, also known as the Holy Name of Jesus Co-Cathedral, is the co-cathedral, or technical cathedra of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It is located in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, about halfway between the New Gate and the Jaffa Gate, within the Old City walls.

Tancred's Tower, known in Arabic as Qasr (al-)Jalud ("Goliath's Castle", see below), was a large tower at the northwest corner of the Old City of Jerusalem, of which only meager remains were unearthed by archaeologists.Today, much of the area of the original structure is beneath the Collège des Frères of the De La Salle Brothers. Parts of it are in the external base of the city wall where the section coming from the New Gate to the northeast meets the section coming from Jaffa Gate to the southeast.

The Al-Khanqah al-Salahiyya Mosque (Arabic: مسجد الخانقاه الصلاحية al-Khānqāh aṣ-Ṣalāḥiyya) is an Islamic place of worship located in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, north of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was named after Saladin, who endowed it. As the name indicates, the complex was originally a khanqah, a place for gatherings of Sufi Islamic adherents, including dervishes. The complex today comprises the mosque as well as a school, a public sitting room, rooms for military officers, a dining room for wayfarers, small rooms for guards, and a very small room for Saladin’s spiritual retreat.

Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center is a pontifical institute founded in 1978 with religious, cultural, and educational purposes. Its main activities are: welcoming pilgrims, divine worship, cultural education and formation of the local population, and ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.

The Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin, also called Greek Catholic Melkite Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin or simply Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation, is a Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral located in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is dedicated to the Annunciation. It serves as the headquarters of the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Dependent Territory of Jerusalem (Archieparchia Hierosolymitana Melchitarum), whose patriarch since 1772 is responsible for the Jerusalem Melkites by the encyclical Orientalium dignitas of Pope Leo XIII. As part of the Old City of Jerusalem, it is categorised as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981.

Jerusalem (; Hebrew: יְרוּשָׁלַיִם Yerushaláyim; Arabic: القُدس Al‑Quds) is a city in Western Asia. Situated on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, it is one of the oldest cities in the world and is considered to be a holy city for the three major Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital, as Israel maintains its primary governmental institutions there and the State of Palestine ultimately foresees it as its seat of power. Because of this dispute, neither claim is widely recognized internationally.Throughout its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, and attacked 52 times. The part of Jerusalem called the City of David shows first signs of settlement in the 4th millennium BCE, in the shape of encampments of nomadic shepherds. During the Canaanite period (14th century BCE), Jerusalem was named as Urusalim on ancient Egyptian tablets, probably meaning "City of Shalem" after a Canaanite deity. During the Israelite period, significant construction activity in Jerusalem began in the 9th century BCE (Iron Age II), and by the 8th century BCE, the city had developed into the religious and administrative centre of the Kingdom of Judah. In 1538, the city walls were rebuilt for a last time around Jerusalem under Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire. Today those walls define the Old City, which has been traditionally divided into four-quarters – known since the early 19th century as the Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters. The Old City became a World Heritage Site in 1981, and is on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Since 1860, Jerusalem has grown far beyond the Old City's boundaries. In 2022, Jerusalem had a population of some 971,800 residents, of which almost 60% were Jews and almost 40% Palestinians. In 2020, the population was 951,100, of which Jews comprised 570,100 (59.9%), Muslims 353,800 (37.2%), Christians 16,300 (1.7%), and 10,800 unclassified (1.1%).According to the Hebrew Bible, King David conquered the city from the Jebusites and established it as the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel, and his son, King Solomon, commissioned the building of the First Temple. Modern scholars argue that Jews branched out of the Canaanite peoples and culture through the development of a distinct monolatrous—and later monotheistic—religion centred on El/Yahweh. These foundational events, straddling the dawn of the 1st millennium BCE, assumed central symbolic importance for the Jewish people. The sobriquet of holy city (Hebrew: עיר הקודש, romanized: 'Ir ha-Qodesh) was probably attached to Jerusalem in post-exilic times. The holiness of Jerusalem in Christianity, conserved in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which Christians adopted as their own "Old Testament", was reinforced by the New Testament account of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection there. In Sunni Islam, Jerusalem is the third-holiest city, after Mecca and Medina. The city was the first qibla, the standard direction for Muslim prayers (salah), and in Islamic tradition, Muhammad made his Night Journey there in 621, ascending to heaven where he speaks to God, according to the Quran. As a result, despite having an area of only 0.9 km2 (3⁄8 sq mi), the Old City is home to many sites of seminal religious importance, among them the Temple Mount with its Western Wall, Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, the status of Jerusalem remains one of the core issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, West Jerusalem was among the areas captured and later annexed by Israel while East Jerusalem, including the Old City, was captured and later annexed by Jordan. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently effectively annexed it into Jerusalem, together with additional surrounding territory. One of Israel's Basic Laws, the 1980 Jerusalem Law, refers to Jerusalem as the country's undivided capital. All branches of the Israeli government are located in Jerusalem, including the Knesset (Israel's parliament), the residences of the Prime Minister (Beit Aghion) and President (Beit HaNassi), and the Supreme Court. The international community rejects the annexation as illegal and treats East Jerusalem as Palestinian territory occupied by Israel.

The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Dependent Territory of Jerusalem (Latin: Hierosolymitana Melchitarum) is a branch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church immediately subject to the Patriarch of Antioch of the Melkites. Yasser Ayyash is the current Vicar Apostolic of the Patriarch Youssef Absi.

The Christian Quarter (Arabic: حارة النصارى, Ḥārat al-Naṣārā; Hebrew: הרובע הנוצרי, Ha-Rova ha-Notsri) is one of the four quarters of the walled Old City of Jerusalem, the other three being the Jewish Quarter, the Muslim Quarter and the Armenian Quarter. The Christian Quarter is situated in the northwestern corner of the Old City, extending from the New Gate in the north, along the western wall of the Old City as far as the Jaffa Gate, along the Jaffa Gate - Western Wall route in the south, bordering on the Jewish and Armenian Quarters, as far as the Damascus Gate in the east, where it borders on the Muslim Quarter. The Christian quarter contains about 40 Christian holy places. First among them is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity's holiest place. Most of its residents are Palestinian Christians, despite their dwindling numbers.

Calvary (Latin: Calvariae or Calvariae locus) or Golgotha (Greek: Γολγοθᾶ, translit. Golgothâ) was a site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where Jesus was crucified.Since at least the early medieval period, it has been a destination for pilgrimage. The exact location of Calvary has been traditionally associated with a place now enclosed within one of the southern chapels of the multidenominational Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a site said to have been recognized by the Roman empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, during her visit to the Holy Land in 325. Other locations have been suggested: in the 19th century, Protestant scholars proposed a different location near the Garden Tomb on Green Hill (now "Skull Hill") about 500 m (1,600 ft) north of the traditional site and historian Joan Taylor has more recently proposed a location about 175 m (574 ft) to its south-southeast.