On Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed, monks and nuns keep harvesting olives

Come October, monks and nuns are busy harvesting olives at the Mount of Olives and the Gethsemane garden where, according to the Gospel, Jesus spent the last night before being taken up the other side of the valley into Jerusalem to be crucified.

- By GIOVANNA DELL'ORTO

For two years, the Israel-Hamas war has cast a pall on the Holy Land. The hundreds of centuries-old olive trees here have shaken periodically in missile attacks targeting Israel.

But this year's harvest happened as a ceasefire agreement was reached, spreading a tenuous hope for peace - peace that olive branches have symbolized since the biblical story of the dove that brought one back to Noah's Ark to signify the end of the flood.

"The land is a gift and the sign of a divine presence," said the Rev. Diego Dalla Gassa, a Franciscan in charge of the harvest in the hermitage next to Gethsemane. The word Gethsemane is derived from the ancient Aramaic's and Hebrew's "oil press."

For Dalla Gassa and the other mostly Catholic congregations on the hill, harvesting olives to make preserves and oil is not a business or even primarily a source of sustenance for their communities. Rather, it's a form of prayer and reverence.

"To be the custodian of holy sites doesn't mean only to guard them, but to live them, physically but also spiritually," he added. "It's really the holy sites that guard us."

Harvesting olives by hand on the Mount of Olives

Early on a recent morning, Dalla Gassa traded his habit for a T-shirt and shorts albeit with an olive wood cross around his neck - and headed to the terraces facing Jerusalem's Old City.