Given the varying degrees of importance that a holy place holds for different parties and the variety of laws used to regulate them, laws pertaining to holy places integrate a broad array of legal, political, social, religious, and economic interests. Acknowledging the difficulty of capturing a singular standard of protection merits examining different existing modalities to discern the means of protection for holy places.

A 2022 Israeli District Court case concerning ownership rights over a Russian Orthodox church in the Old City of Jerusalem shall provide the platform for scrutinizing the relevant laws and variety of interests at play for holy places in Israel, providing insights into the importance of accounting for divergent interests in the cultural heritage protection milieu. This article shall highlight the approaches used towards holy place protection in a difficult and complex context, Israel, to better understand heritage protection methods for unique or significant cultural sites in other regions.

While for the sixth/twelfth century onwards there is no lack of data allowing the recovery of the sacred geography of al-Andalus, such data are scarce for the earlier period. This article surveys the available information for Umayyad al-Andalus and how it relates to the different strata of the population, analysing it within the context of the Islamicization.

The article discusses the question of how Israel ought to treat its minority religions and whether its actual policies towards them accord with her moral and constitutional obligations. The first part of the paper offers three arguments purporting to show that Israel is justified in granting privileged status to the Jewish religion over other religions, and rejects each of them in turn. In particular, it rejects the view that Israel is allowed to privilege Judaism over other religions as far as the funding of religious services and needs is concerned. Nonetheless, the possibility that, on the symbolic level, weak privileging of Judaism may be permissible is left open. The second part of the paper questions whether the State of Israel guarantees equal treatment to all religions, and the answer is in the negative. Finally, the paper discusses the religious freedom of non-Jews in Israel and the way it has been interpreted by the courts. It is contended that both in terms of the freedom of religion and in terms of the freedom from religion, the protection of non-Jews is somewhat weaker than that granted to Jews, a state of affairs that ought to be remedied.