Before the center was inaugurated 20 years ago this month, the BYU Jerusalem program was run out of hotel rooms and rented classrooms for 15 years.

Like many Western religions, the LDS Church has deep emotional ties to Jerusalem.

The Book of Mormon, which members of the religion abide by together with the New and Old Testaments, says that Israelites migrated to the New World and were the ancestors of American Indians.

Latter-day Saints believe that church founder Joseph Smith Jr. translated the holy book from golden plates he discovered through an angel in the 1820s and restored authentic Christianity.

The book follows the story of a family who leaves Jerusalem for the Americas around 600 B.C. In 1841, Smith sent apostle Orson Hyde to Jerusalem to dedicate the land for Smith's prophecy of the return of the Jews. A park on the Mount of Olives commemorates Hyde's pilgrimage.

"In so many ways, Jerusalem ... constitutes the scene, the setting and the circumference of our religious heritage," Elder Holland recently told a new group of 44 students at the church's Jerusalem center. "The origins of our sacred texts all focus us here."