Mount Zion Cemetery, Jerusalem 2.6

The Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Israel is a cemetery owned by the Anglican Church Missionary Trust Association Ltd., London, represented by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and The Middle East. In 1848 Samuel Gobat, Bishop of Jerusalem, opened the cemetery and dedicated it as ecumenical graveyard for congregants of Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed and old Catholic faith. Since its original beneficiary, the Bishopric of Jerusalem was maintained as a joint venture of the Anglican Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Prussia, a united Protestant Landeskirche of Lutheran and Reformed congregations, until 1886, the Jerusalem Lutheran congregation preserved a right to bury congregants there also after the Jerusalem Bishopric had become a solely Anglican diocese.LocationThe cemetery is located on the southwestern slope of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, southerly surrounded by the street Ma'alei haShalom (מעלי השלום). Mount Zion Cemetery is reached passing the site of the former Bishop Gobat School, since 1967 housing the Jerusalem University College, founded as American Institute of Holy Land Studies in 1957. ּBetween 1948 and 1967 the congregations using the cemetery, with most of their congregants living in then East Jerusalem, had very complicated access to the cemetery then located in what was West Jerusalem. So in those years a further ecumenical Protestant cemetery in Beit Safafa, Jarmaleh Cemetery, was opened on the road to Gush Etzion opposite the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies.