CAIRO — Inside a stuffy office just off Tahrir Square, hotel manager Nemr Lotfy, a Coptic Christian, remembers his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

"It was always one of my greatest hopes to go inside the tomb of Jesus Christ," he smiles, talking at length about the Garden of Gethsemane, the Old City and the Holy Sepulchre. "It was always a dream for me, to live it — not just to see it." To do that, Lotfy had to disobey a decades-old church order banning Copts from visiting Jerusalem. "I want to go again and again, but we must respect the order of our pope."

Lotfy is a practical man, but talks piously. On the wall behind his desk, a photograph proudly shows Lotfy meeting Pope Shenouda III, the former head of Egypt's Coptic church and the man responsible for the 1978 ban, before his death in March 2012.

Shenouda was a soldier during the 1948 war against Israel, and his ban was a response to Israel's occupation and the Camp David Accords and 1979 treaty, which are still unpopular with many Egyptians. The ban was also in response to the failure of Israeli courts to return the Deir El-Sultan monastery to the Coptic Church. The monastery has been disputed by Egyptian and Ethiopian churches in the Holy City for decades — yet another story of appropriation, dispossession, claims and counter-claims in a city that has become internationally recognized for such controversies.