Zion Protestant Cemetery searching for the Essene Gateway mentioned by Flavius Josephus. On 28 April 1981 the board assessed that Mount Zion Cemetery were in a good condition, the ongoing excavations, leaving the enclosing walls damaged, left their traces on the cemetery and exposed it to vandalism. In March 1983 the German embassy offered to contribute in an eventual renovation. In 1986 several newspapers published articles and letters to the editors expressing concerns because of the decay of the cemetery. In early 1986 the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, uttered his worries and offered the aid of the City of Jerusalem for the preservation of the cemetery. In 1986 the board commissioned an Israeli architectural firm for its expertise on the state of the cemetery and in order to project a general overhaul. Although the Abbey finally repaired the enclosing wall, in March 1989 the board of cemetery prohibited Pixner any further excavations on its cemetery. The board started fundraising for a general renovation of the cemetery in order to thoroughly reconstruct the enclosing walls, to terrace slopes for gaining additional grave sites, and to repair the paths. Furthermore, all graves were to be refurbished and a viewing platform to be erected to develop the cemetery for tourists. On 14 February 1989 the German embassy in Tel Aviv acknowledged the importance of Mount Zion Cemetery for the ecumenical history of British Anglican and German Evangelical ecclesiastical institutions, also accepting the necessity to finance the maintenance of the cemetery. The fundraising succeeded with £10,000 donated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, £5,758 (DM 19,000) by the German War Graves Commission, £4,242 (DM 14,000) by the German Foreign Office, £3,939 (DM 13,000) by the Evangelical Jerusalem's Foundation, £3,030 (DM 10,000) by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), £5,393.90 (₪ 18,000) by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, and £4,255.19 (₪ 14,200) by Jerusalem's Evangelical congregation of German language. The commissioned Israeli architects started construction works in 1989. Already in the next year the board administrator asked them to stop all constructions, arguing the board's plans for the future of the cemetery were still unclear. In May 1993 the architects, whose contract had not been formally cancelled, noticed that another firm unilaterally commissioned by the Anglican side continued the constructions. So the originally commissioned architects took recourse against the board for breach of contract. Provost Karl-Heinz Ronecker, vice-chairman of the board, then negotiated a