An Israeli Jewish man spat on the entrance of St. James Monastery in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter on Tuesday night, the night of Israel’s national elections, and cursed the Armenian guard who confronted him. Jerusalemite-Armenian journalist Kegham Balian published the surveillance footage.
“Have you no shame spitting on a monastery?” the guard asked him, according to Balian.
“Shut up and go f**k yourself,” the man replied.
St. James is the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the residence of the Armenian Patriarch.
It is the third documented assault on the monastery entrance since August. On September 26, surveillance footage captured an Israeli Jewish man attempting to urinate on the monastery wall before an Armenian guard forced him away. On August 2, six Israelis, five minors and one adult, spat at the entrance, banged on its gates and threw stones at the compound and at the window of an Armenian woman filming them from her home. Ten people were arrested over that attack.
Earlier this month, the Religious Freedom Data Center documented 106 acts of harassment across 96 incidents between July and September 2026. Of the 77 incidents recorded inside Jerusalem’s Old City, 45 occurred on Armenian Patriarchate Street, in the heart of the Armenian Quarter. Spitting accounted for 77 of the 106 recorded acts.
“The Armenian community suffers particularly severely,” the report said. “Thousands of people walk through its streets on their way to the Western Wall, and it has the highest number of documented incidents of harassment. Regrettably, the community has received no specific attention, response, or action plan to put an end to its suffering.”
RFDC volunteers were deployed on field shifts throughout the Old City during the Jewish High Holidays, which the report said doubled the number of documented incidents compared with the same period in previous years. The Center estimated that dozens of additional spitting incidents occur each month without being reported, documented, or countered, and said such acts have become established as a norm among perpetrators. It documented clergy and monks leaving their institutions in ordinary clothes and community members concealing necklaces bearing crosses beneath their clothing.
On Yom Kippur, a 9-year-old Armenian Christian boy was pepper-sprayed in the face in Mamilla by a 22-year-old Israeli Jewish settler from the West Bank settlement of Ganei Modi’in. Israeli police closed the case almost immediately, reopened it only after Israeli Channel 13 aired the story, and arrested the settler on September 27. He was released on October 4 with a restraining order and four days of house arrest while the case proceeds.
The Armenian community of Jerusalem traces its origins to the 4th century and has maintained an uninterrupted presence in the Holy Land for 1,700 years, the oldest living Armenian community outside Armenia. It now numbers approximately 2,000 Jerusalemite Armenians, a population that has declined sharply since 1948.
