JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Ehud Barak heads slowly homeward from a week abroad on Tuesday to find ancient enmities, pitting Christian against Muslim and Jew against Jew, rearing their ugly heads again.

In Jesus's home town of Nazareth, defiant Islamic leaders said they would go ahead with plans to lay a cornerstone for a mosque near a main Christian shrine on Tuesday, rejecting appeals by the Vatican and other Muslims.

And to make matters worse, Barak's cabinet is feuding over a war of words in the ethnically polarized town of Bet Shemesh between ultra-Orthodox rabbis of North African descent and secular immigrant Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Christian leaders locked churches across the Holy Land on Monday in protest at Israeli-approved plans to build the mosque near Nazareth's Basilica of the Annunciation. They plan to keep them shut on Tuesday, despite the sight of pilgrims weeping.

But Muslim town official Ahmed Zuabi was unmoved. ``Let no one interfere with us,'' he said on Monday. ``We oppose the interference of any side, be it the Vatican or any other party.''

Vatican fury over the mosque has clouded prospects for a stop in Nazareth when Pope John Paul tours the Holy Land in March. Christians believe the basilica marks the site where the Angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary she would bear Jesus.

Israel declared itself committed to defending Christian interests and said the church closures were regrettable.

But Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy land, said: ``If the Israeli government had been interested in the good of (Nazareth) and its people, it would have stopped this ordeal.''

Rabbis ``Waging War'' On Immigrants

In Bet Shemesh, local heads of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party enraged Russian-born Israelis by publicly dismissing them as ''hundreds of thousands of Gentiles flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth.''

``Perhaps we must build special cities just for them within the land of Israel,'' Moshe Abutbol of Shas, deputy mayor of Bet Shemesh, told Israel Radio.

Cabinet minister Natan Sharansky said Shas rabbis were ''trying to start a war'' against Russian immigrants.

``Next they'll propose...building ghettos in Israel,'' said Sharansky, whose wife is an Orthodox Jew.

He said he might respond to the Shas statements by pulling his Yisrael ba-Aliya immigrant party out of Barak's coalition.

Barak, leaving New York for talks on Tuesday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair before returning to Israel on Wednesday, also faces domestic turbulence over economic issues.

He capped his U.S. visit on Monday with a speech urging Wall Street to invest in Israel to cash in on the economic boom that he said would accompany an era of regional peace.

But a Gallup poll commissioned by Israel Channel Two Television said only 22 percent of Israelis thought Barak's handling of unemployment and poverty had been correct.

Over 50 percent thought it had been wrong -- a statistic that could have serious political implications for a man who made the economy, rather than security, the central plank of his election campaign.