So opines Ha’aretz today while writing concerning the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ being constructed atop, of all places, a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. Partially, it notes
… when the Wiesenthal center chose the Mamilla cemetery site from a range of locations that were offered, it was wrong. And late last month, when Israel’s Supreme Court gave the project the green light, and Rabbi Hier responded that “moderation and tolerance have prevailed,” he was dead wrong. … In 2006, less than two years after Rabbi Hier, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, architect Frank Gehry and much of the Israeli cabinet attended the groundbreaking ceremony of the museum, construction was abruptly – and correctly – halted: Workers excavating the site had struck bones. At that point, the Wiesenthal center, mindful of its stated mission, should have immediately begun a search for an alternative site. Instead, it spent a fortune in legal fees fighting a protracted court battle in which, in a very real sense, everyone came out the loser. After all, this is the same organization that labored for 15 long years, in the words of Wiesenthal center associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper, to help “galvanize world opinion to force the removal of a Carmelite convent from the grounds of Auschwitz.” Why had the center worked so hard and for so long to win the removal of a Catholic convent built there? “Auschwitz is the largest Jewish cemetery – the single largest unmarked human graveyard – in history,” Cooper noted in 2005. “It deserves universal respect.”
Rabbi Cooper was right: A burial ground of one faith must be respected by people of all religions, even if the graves are unmarked. So it was for Jewish graves in Auschwitz. So it was last year, in Vilnius, where Jews protested vociferously when officials granted permits for apartments to be built on top of an area believed to be part of Lithuania’s largest Jewish cemetery. So it was with Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem: Jews were justifiably outraged when they learned that during Jordanian rule in that area, construction on and around the cemetery destroyed large numbers of Jewish graves. And respect for another faith should certainly be the rule in the case of a site said to have been Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948.
This points out the irony of Jerusalem: what’s good for Jews is good and what’s good for others isn’t of concern. Do read the whole.
This reminds me of the Christian and Muslim celebrations (even here in the US) when Muslims destroyed the Buddha’s in Afghanistan some years back–the largest Buddha’s known to exist, carved generations ago, now defaced and lost forever. I may be an atheist, and I don’t unnecessarily believe that faith should be respected, I do not accept the defecation and destruction of art, artifact, or grave site by anyone, whether these be religious in type or not, and whether it be done for religious reasons or not. Every generation should have the benefit of learning from the past. It is, after all, how progression in our cultures happens.