Judsonia weekly advance., 1916-04-19

does not coincide with that of the western churches, holy week in Jerusalem is celebrated predominanty according to the Greek calendar the services of the other churches being repeated on their own dates.
 In all the Greek orthodox countries-Russfa, Roumania, Greece, Bulgaria, Seryia, Montenegro, and a large part of Austria-Hung gary-Easter is celebrated with great fervor and devotion The Easter kiss is a well-known incident of these celebrations
 Jerusalem is naturally full of churches, monas. teries, hospices and hospitals of the various creeds, and every of them at Easter brings out it's own peculiar religious individuality. The Latin church, for instance, whose establishment in Jerusalem harks back to Godfrey de Bouillon and his crusaders, has a number of oriental churches united to the Roman Catholic church. Thus there the United Greeks the United Syrians, the United Nestorians, the United Ar menians, the Maronites, all of whom celebrate mass in their own tongue and add in their ceremonies and garb picturesque distinctive ness to the whole.
 Then there are the Copts, the Armenians, the Syrian Jacobites, the Nestorans the Abyssinians besides Greeks and Protestants. The relative standing of the various churches is in a measure expressed in the way they share the 15 lamps that burn in the Holy Sepulcher chapel, which is in the center of the that was rolled away from Jesus grave by the angels Five of these lamps belong to the Latins, five to the Creeks
 
 Away from the ecclesiastical ceremonial the pilgrim in Easter time seeks the traditional places where Lord spent his last days and nights Of these Gethsemane is the principal goal and here the difference in creed among the many visitors is obliterated by an earnest and quiet devotion which is unexpectedly free from the emotional
 Another figure has a prominent place in Easter celebrations in Jerusalem that of Moses, whose liberation of the Jewish people from the yoke of Egypt is commemorated in the ancient Hebrew paschal feast.
 There is a very little known Mohammedan celebration which, though no longer so general as formerly is still a most interesting one. To the Mohammedan it must be remembered, Jeru- salem is a holy city, like Mecca and Medina and there is saying among Arabs, Syria is the blessed county, Palestine the holy land and Je- rusalem. the holy city, is the holy of holies"
 Native Mohammedans and pilgrims make up a procession and issue from the Sitti Myriam gate. They joined by throngs of their breth- ren from the neighboring villages, and amid the widest enthusiasm. with standards being borne aloft and to the typical Arab music of drum and ife the pilgrimage proceeds in the direction of the Dead
 As the Arabs claim common descent with the Jews from Abraham, the Holy Land holds tra- ditions equally sacred to them. Jerusalem is second only to Mecca in sanctity because it tains, according to tradition, the rock of Abra- hams sacrifice, over which the famed mosque of Omar is built The Arab pilgrimage to the burial place of Moses recalls the similar to the tomb of Noah, near the ruins of Baalbek, short dis tance from Damascus.
 In cosmopolitan charm Easter in Constantinople almost equals that found in Jerusalem The capital of the Turkish empire is of course in itself highly cosmopolitan; and there is no other city in the world where many languages are heard in the streets, not by foreigners, but by the variegated native population. The background here is not Jewish and Mohammedan, in Jerusalem, but Mohammedan and Christian. with strong tinge of Spanish Jewry.