Jerusalem Museum Of Tolerance Built On Muslim Graves

Palestine Monitor

2 September 2009

Even though Frank Gehry is well-known for his original architectural work, he has his detractors. A common criticism is that his buildings do not seem to belong in their surroundings ’organically’. This could not be more true than in the case of the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.

The museum, being built atop an ancient Muslim cemetery, is a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose founder Rabbi Marvin Hier envisions the museum as a "great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility." The site had been a cemetery for at least one thousand years, and building required the excavation of peoples’ remains.

According to Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the land was given to them by the Israeli government. He claims that "the Simon Wiesenthal Center is not building on the nearby Mamilla cemetery, but on the adjacent site which, for nearly a half-century, served as Jerusalem’s municipal car park...during all this time, not a single Muslim group or individual, including today’s most vociferous critics said a word in protest although as they argued before the Court they knew all along it was a cemetery, yet kept silent for a half-century."

The Rabbi insists they were silent because, as the High Court said, "...the area has not been classified as a cemetery for decades."

"Imagine the chaos to society if, after fifty years of designation for public use, land would be changed and reverted to what it may have been four or five centuries ago", the Rabbi has said, on behalf of the center.

This is the same organization which labored for 15 long years, in the words of Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Abraham Cooper, helping "galvanize world opinion to force the removal of a Carmelite convent from the grounds of Auschwitz."

Why had the Wiesenthal 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 and, "It deserves universal respect."

While the location of the Museum Of Tolerance-Jerusalem on to a Muslim graveyard has elicited the most media attention, architectural, archaeological and social critiques have accompanied the project throughout its course. Haaretz architecture critic Esther Zandberg has critiqued the location of an ostentatious Gehry design at the heart of Jerusalem, arguing that Jerusalem is not Bilbao. Others have expressed concern over the focus of the museum on tolerance amongst Jews, rather than tolerance between Jews and Arabs. The plan has been severely criticized by both Israelis and Palestinians. Construction had been stayed several times by the courts before allowing it to continue.

In this case, tolerance has shown to be an abstract idea and instead of the building being a symbol for the search of harmony based on mutual respect, the construction led to another polemic issue that we can add to the long list of conflicts in Jerusalem.

What is compassion, what is tolerance, if not the ability to reconsider one’s own actions in the light of the ways in which they may injure others?