In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditional site of Jesus’ tomb, Greek Archbishop Diodoros was installed in March, 1981, as the new Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, one of the five ancient Orthodox patriarchates, is headquarters for a church whose domain is Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian West Bank and whose flock consists almost entirely of Arabs—some 120,000 in Jordan and 40,000 in Israel and the West Bank.

Many of Jerusalem's Christian, Jewish, and Arab leaders attended the installation ceremony at the twelfth-century Romanesque-Gothic church, as did representatives of the more than fifty local Orthodox. Catholic, Uniate, Monophysite and Protestant communities.