CRAZY? HEY, YOU NEVER KNOW

By LISA BEYER/IN JERUSALEM

On the door of the reception office at Jerusalem's Kfar Shaul psychiatric Hospital, someone has posted a bumper sticker, popular among one faction of Orthodox Jews, that reads, PREPARE FOR THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH. To hear a number of the patients tell it, he's already on the premises.

Kfar Shaul is a kind of holding pen for victims of the so-called Jerusalem Syndrome, an affliction of tourists who, overwhelmed by the city's intense spiritual evocations, have become convinced that they are the Saviour, or some other biblical figure, or that they have been given a special message or mandate by God. There was the bearded Italian whom police found wandering in the hills around Bethlehem, dressed in a sack, with cloth bags for shoes and New Testament in hand, completely unaware that it was snowing, confident that he was Jesus Christ. And the angry German who phoned police to complain that his hotel's kitchen staff had prevented him from preparing the Last Supper. And the naked, sword-wielding man who ran through the Old City on what he explained to arresting officers was a mission to heal the blind.

So powerful are Jerusalem's psychic ethers that Kfar Shaul sees 50 such patients a year. About half are from North America-usually the U.S.-and the rest come mainly from Western Europe; cases are equally split between Christians and Jews (the city's few Muslim tourists have so far managed to keep their wits intact). According to Moshe Kalian, a psychiatrist at Kfar Shaul, Jerusalem Syndrome may be set off by the thrill of visiting a place previously known only as a sublime dream-"like a movie-star fan who suddenly gets to kiss his idol." Or sufferers may fall victim to the disappointment of discovering that Jerusalem is also an earthly town complete with strip malls and traffic jams. "Unwilling to accept that reality," Kalian explains, "they withdraw from it." Most have a history of mental problems.

At times, Kfar Shaul has housed two or three Messiahs at once. "But they don't fight about it," says Kalian. "They are so sure that they are each the one and that the others will be revealed sooner or later as frauds." The hospital's job is not to cure these patients but to calm them down, sometimes using antipsychotic drugs, so that they can return home and be treated in a more familiar environment. There have been a few escapes from the facility, notably that of "Samson," a burly Canadian who demonstrated his Old Testament credentials by ripping the metal grille off a ward window. A hospital staff member spotted him at a bus station and retrieved him without incident.

The folks who live nearby are generally aware of the hospital's function-at times perhaps overly so. Recently locals brought in an elderly woman who, hysterical and speaking nothing but Greek, was assumed to be stricken with Jerusalem Syndrome. In fact, she was a tourist who had simply taken the wrong bus and wound up in an unfamiliar neighborhood-upset, yes, but in no immediate danger of assuming divinity. ^1