On 18 October 1484 Arnold von Burgsdorff, Prince-Bishop of Brandenburg, issued an indulgence, promising all those helping to restore the chapel 40 days less in the purgatory.

[1] The indulgence is the oldest surviving document mentioning the chapel, then consecrated to Mary(am) of Nazareth, the Holy Cross, Pope Fabian, and Sebastianus of Narbonne.

[7] In 1728–1731 Philipp Gerlach replaced the old structure including the sepulchre chapel by a new church building, whose southerly tower had a wooden top, which – poorly built as it was – had to be torn down again in 1747.

[6] In the following years the congregation lost many of its parishioners because its parish became commercialised and huge edifices of publishing houses and insurances gradually superseded the prior residential buildings.

The Positive Union, a conservative Kirchenpartei[11] with traditions back in the 19th century, had no candidates running for presbytership in the congregation of Jerusalem Church, thus many nationalist parishioners rather voted for the German Christians.

The liberal D. Alfred Fischer (1874–1940), since 1901 pastor at Jerusalem Church and opposing the German Christians, and his younger colleague Dr. Rudolf Köhler (until May 1933) had hard times with them dominating the presbytery since 1932.

[14][15] At the unconstitutional premature re-election of the presbyters and synodals, discretionarily decreed by Hitler for 23 July 1933 the German Christians could increase their share of the seats in the presbytery to 65%.

Their presbyterial speaker Walter Hartig, president (Obermeister) of Berlin's professional association of the men's tailors (Herrenschneiderinnung), tried to establish the Führerprinzip within the congregation.

Horn, preserving some dignity as a pastor, requested the presbytery to reaccept Martha Fränkel (then living in Kochstraße 62), a parishioner of Jewish descent.

Christiane Ilisch (daughter of the Protestant literary historian Dr. Heinrich Spiero, classified a Jew, meaning within the Nazi ideology a member of a genetic group not a religion, which one could choose or secede from) and her husband asked Fischer to baptise their children.

In August 1943, the Kingdom of Romania bought the church building and the pertaining rectory and conveyed them to the Romanian Orthodox congregation of Berlin (est.

This was not to last for long, because most buildings in the neighbourhood, including Jerusalem Church and rectory, were destroyed in the area bombardment organised and carried out by the United States Army Air Forces on 3 February 1945.

After long negotiations with the People's Republic of Romania, the Senate of Berlin bought the site with the ruins of Jerusalem Church, which were afterwards demolished (March 1961).

[19] The site was cleared and integrated into the wider crossroads of today's Axel-Springer-Straße (from northeast), Lindenstraße (from southwest), Oranienstraße (from the southeast) and Rudi-Dutschke-Straße (from the west).

The publishing house paid for a little memorial for the church and the setting of cobble stones, laid into the asphalt of the crossroads, to indicate the contour of the former outside walls.

The politically western section of the congregation under the presbyters Werner Gericke, Günter Heyder, Erwin Köhn and Georg Schmidt decided to erect a new church building.

The old church building housed a famous organ, a masterpiece built by Wilhelm Sauer and often played in concerts, which burnt on 3 February 1945.

The carrara statue of Jesus of Nazareth, created in 1898 by Prof. Adolf Brütt or his disciple Franz Tübbecke after Paul Heisler, from the old altar stands now in the chapel (since 29 May 2005 used as Bulgarian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Boris the Baptiser) on the Friedhof V der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No.