Demonstrators Support Palestinian Petition to Stop Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem

Activists in Los Angeles, Geneva and Jerusalem demonstrated last week in support of a Palestinian petition to the United Nations aimed at preventing the Simon Wiesenthal Center from building a Museum of Tolerance on what activists say is part of a medieval Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

Sixty families who say they have relatives buried in the Mamilla cemetery signed the petition asking the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Human Rights to investigate the issue. A decision by the U.N. would not carry any legal authority to overturn a 2008 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court green-lighting the project.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said the $80-million museum, already under construction, will go forward. He emphasized that the 3-acre site had been a municipal parking lot since 1960, and does not affect the Mamilla cemetery adjacent to the site.

“From 1960, every day Muslims and Jews and Christians parked their cars there,” Hier said in a phone interview. “How can Muslims park their cars every day on what they call a sacred cemetery which houses the remains of their ancestors? Obviously, they did not think it was a cemetery, and that is why the Supreme Court ruled against them.”

But activists say the original parking lot also violated Muslim remains, and building a museum dedicated to tolerance and human dignity atop it is an additional affront.

“When years ago Arabs built on top of an ancient Jewish cemetery, Jews the world over were understandably outraged. It is just as big an outrage, as well as a severe blow against peace and religious tolerance in the Middle East, for the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance to now seek to build a new museum of tolerance on the sacred burial site of Muslims,” said Rabbi Leonard Beerman, the founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles and a longtime human rights activist.

Beerman spoke at a press conference last week held across the street from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Pico Boulevard. Reform rabbis, human rights activists and Muslim and Christian leaders attended the press conference, organized by the National Lawyers Guild, a human rights bar association.

Hier said human rights organizations and the media have bought into a propaganda-driven campaign being led by Sheik Raed Salah, leader of the extremist Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. The Wiesenthal Center has filed complaints with The New York Times, the BBC and other outlets protesting the use of a picture of Muslim tombstones in the Mamilla cemetery adjacent to the site, making it look as if the Wiesenthal Center is ready to bulldoze the site — which Hier said is an “abject lie.” The BBC has apologized for using the picture.

Dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 12 pitted Hier’s assertion that the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Supreme Court determined the site was not a cemetery and could be used for construction against a piece by Saree Makdisi, a UCLA professor who claims that the Wiesenthal Center is desecrating tens of thousands of graves.

The Wiesenthal Center has suffered a huge public relations blow with thiscontroversy. The Reform movement’s rabbinic umbrella group came out against the museum, and protesters have included everyone from Palestinian activists to Orthodox students. Frank Gehry, the original architect on the project, recently pulled out, though he said it was out of financial concerns, and not because of the political issue.

But Hier said it is a fight worth fighting. The site is one of the few parcels available for building close to the city’s tourism center, he said, adding that Israel greatly needs the messages of tolerance the Museum has been able to impart to its 250,000 multi-ethnic visitors a year in Los Angeles.

“We’re not going to give in to them because it’s much too important a project,” he said. “We’re not going to give in to a bunch of fanatic Israel bashers or people who might be envious that the Simon Wiesenthal Center is going to have something to say on the issue of tolerance in Israel.

“We’re going forward, without any apologies, on that spot,” Hier said. “It will be built, and it will be a great institution and will do for people in Israel what the Museum of Tolerance has done for people here in Los Angeles.”