For TIME'S team of Jerusalem-based journalists and photographers who helped Senior Writer Otto Friedrich with this week's cover story on the ancient holy city--and troubled political powder keg--assignment to Jerusalem tends to elicit emotions ranging from reverence to worry. "This Eastertide, my second in Jerusalem," says TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Aikman, "has re-evoked all the emotions surrounding the original Passion nearly two millenniums ago. But the city has a special, almost brooding quality, as though it waits impatiently for the next turn of destiny's wheel."

In the City of God, the wait is never long. "It is a miracle," says Correspondent Marlin Levin, who has spent nearly all of his professional life as a reporter operating in and out of Jerusalem, "that this city that has been utterly destroyed so many times is indestructible, always rising from the ashes, always new." Senior Writer Friedrich, a veteran of many TIME cover stories, recently visited Jerusalem and returned with vivid, unforgettable impressions. "Whatever your expectations," he says, "the city will surprise you." Adds TIME Reporter Robert Rosenberg, a four-year resident: "No matter how blase I try to be, I know that to live in Jerusalem is to be privileged. No other reporting beat in the world can include background paragraphs on events that occurred two or three thousand years ago." Agrees Reporter-Researcher Peggy Berman: "It's a terribly inspiring place--layers and layers of civilization on top of one another."

David Rubinger, who took most of the pictures accompanying the cover story, has been photographing Jerusalem for 35 years. Like many longtime residents of the city, he worries about "the tragedy of our failure to achieve unification of hearts and minds." But as a professional photographer, Rubinger sees in Jerusalem a lot more eternal beauty than beast: "The city is an ongoing love affair of the eye." TIME'S Nafez Nazzal, a Palestinian Arab, moved with his family from Jaffa to Jerusalem's Old City during the 1948 war.

He was six at the time. Educated in the U.S., he is well versed in Jerusalem's historic ups and downs. "The walls that divided the city before the 1967 war are gone," he says, "but nothing in their place was built to fill the gap between Jews and Arabs." Says TIME Reporter Robert Slater: "I would like to think that one day the city will truly become an example of brotherhood and coexistence. History, of course, reveals other grisly lessons, and so one is apt to take one day at a time." As Levin puts it, "Jerusalem is not an assignment; it is a career."

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