NOT NEWCOMERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 139, 15 June 1938, Page 21

NOT NEWCOMERS.

ABYSSINIANS IN JERUSALEM. JERUSALEM. The Abyssinian exiles who are taking refuge in Jerusalem are not the first of their race to come to the Holy City. Reputable authorities record the presence of Ethiopians in Jerusalem as far back as the time of the first crusades. Their fortunes here have risen and waned. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the most precious possession of the eastern churches, once saw the Ethiopians well entrenched. They owned several of the church's cluipels and shrines and thereby commanded great influence. But they have long been strangers to the body of the church, and all that is left to them to-dav is a chapel, the smallest in the world, on the roof of St. Helena's Chapel. Here they celebrate Christmas once every month, except March, with quaint ritual, accompanied by the Iteating of tom-toms that stamps them ns genuine Africans. The 180 Ethiopian clergy in the Holy City, monks and nuns under the leadership of a venerable abbot, were once comfortably off. In addition to the six buildings they own in Jerusalem, one of them a fashionable building of flats, they were the object of constant solicitude of the Ethiopian royal family. The Negus sent them a generous monetary allowance, and the Empress supplied them with vestments, church decorations and an intimate touch that they miss not least, an annual supply of choice Ethiopian coffee. The buildings, all except one which has been given over to the nobles, -still remain to them. But the absence of the Negus' allowance has left them in hard straits. Yet their lot is still considerably easier than that of the nobles. And perhaps for that reason, because the nobles resent the clergy's comparative security while they themselves are reduced to utter poverty, a certain coldness has sprung up between the two sections of the community, giving, if possible, a deeper note to the tragedy.