Nancy Dinsmore, an American nurse working as director of development and communication for the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, is debating her future in Israel. Recently, Dinsmore's visa expired and the Israeli Ministry of Interior told her that, having possessed an A1 visa for over 63 months, she had exceeded her lifetime maximum. She now has two options: continue on a tourist visa, never knowing what she will encounter at the border--or leave the country, and her job as a missionary for the Episcopal Church.
Potentially serious
The visa restrictions, which threaten to jeopardize the mission work of the church, are causing deep concern for religious workers in Jerusalem, especially Christians who, as a faith group, are in an ever increasing minority.
"The visa problem here is very real and potentially very serious," Dean Ross Jones of St George's College Jerusalem told ENS. "I know people who have been here fifteen or twenty years whose visas have not been renewed." Jones' own visa expired in December. He didn't even try to renew it, knowing that he would be leaving in July. He travels often enough for a 90-day tourist visa to be adequate.
Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal of Jerusalem said that the Secretary General of the YMCA in East Jerusalem, who has been working on a permanent residency visa for almost ten years, was told that he may have to "pack and leave the country" and will not be permitted to come back. "It is becoming extremely difficult for our clergy to get visas for them and their spouses and this is causing chaos in the deployment of clergy," Riah said. "There is another case where it is becoming very difficult to secure a visa for one of our clergy from Jordan to simply visit."
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold recently joined fifty leaders of evangelical and mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches and church-related organizations in the U.S. in delivering a letter to President George W. Bush asking for his intervention at this "serious Time."
"The denial and delay of visas, by Israel, for clergy and church personnel result in understaffed seminaries, churches, hospitals, educational and other institutions, so that they have neither the spiritual nor the professional staff that they need," the letter stated. "The Catholic Church operates 151 institutions...[and] Protestant denominations have similar institutions and many suffer from lack of sufficient personnel due to visa problems."
Extreme anxiety
No one really knows what the future holds, even for tourist visas, as thousands have been turned back at the airport seeking them. "So far those denied have been people Israel has reason to believe are trying to document human rights abuse," Jones explained. "That is different from the systematic denial of long-term visas to resident Christians. Neither of them is good."
People in Jerusalem can only speculate about motives for the change, but none of the speculation leads to positive conclusions. Whatever the rationale, the situation continues to cause anxiety to Christians, Muslims, and other people of faith who fear they will lose all access to some of their most holy places.
