ELDER OF ZIYON: Muslims claiming that Mount of Olives is not a historic Jewish cemetery

Arabic media are reporting that Sheikh Sabri Abu Diab, imam of a mosque in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood, is claiming that the Jewish ties to Har HaZeitim - the Mount of Olives - are fictional.

Diab claims that although the Ottoman government allowed limited numbers of Jews to be interred there, the hundreds of acres of the Mount are mostly filled with fake Jewish graves that were created only for Jews to grab more Jerusalem-area land.

In reality, the Mount of Olives has been a Jewish graveyard since First Temple times. Some 150,000 Jews are estimated to be buried there.

Tens of thousands of gravestones were desecrated by Jordan during the 19 years that the world considers a "status quo."

Here is a photo of the gravestones being used as stairs for an Jordanian army camp:

And here is a gravestone used to help build a latrine in Jordan:

Indeed, the only people ever to fake graves in Jerusalem to grab land are, naturally, Muslims.

But these are just competing narratives, and the Arab lies must be respected as much as historic truth, right? That seems to be the rule in the Middle East nowadays.

Disrupting their eternal rest Considered the most important cemetery in Judaism, its dry earth is sent all over of world. Yet despite its importance, and even though the state comptroller issued a harsh report about it, The Mount of Olives is still open and unprotected, at the mercy of the residents of east Jerusalem. Menachem Begin, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, S.Y. Agnon and Rabbi Kook are turning over in their graves

If they only knew what was going to be happening someday in the future, it may very well be that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, S.Y. Agnon, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Menachem and AlizaBegin would have thought twice before requesting to be buried on the Mt. of Olives. The most ancient and largest Jewish cemetery in the world, and in all likelihood the most important, has in recent years been abandoned to vandals, criminals and illegals who turned it into an abused public area, more closely resembling a garbage dump.

Exactly two years ago, in May 2010, then-State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss referred to conditions on the Mt. of Olives in a report. “Rehabilitation of the cemetery is proceeding at a snail’s pace, its level of maintenance is unsatisfactory, security is extremely low, and vandalism and criminal incidents continue to occur in it. We strongly suspect that if security is not ensured, all of the monies and work invested in will go down the drain,” Lindenstrauss wrote at the time.

Related stories:

• Report: Security at Mt. Olives slipping
• Vandalism returns to Mount of Olives cemetery
• Yeshiva on Mount of Olives to get 24 more housing units 

Several years before, the government decided in “Priorities – Reinforcing the city of Jerusalem,” to allocate more than NIS 80 million (about $22M) to deal with this issue. “There are serious doubts that the investment of millions of shekels in restoration and development works will go down the drain,” wrote the comptroller, in an understatement.

In the two years since, there was little change. After all, the dead are unable to protest, and the authorities are turning a blind eye, resulting in no real change on the ground. The site, where many of the outstanding Jewish leaders of the past few centuries along with tens of thousands of other people are buried, has been abandoned and forgotten.

The first problem the Mount has is its location – east Jerusalem, fertile ground for nationalist-based vandalism. In recent years, hundreds of headstones in the cemetery were destroyed and shattered or covered with garbage and excrement. Families who came for gravesite visits to their dear ones’ final resting place found empty liquor bottles, used condoms and other evidence of especially lively ‘night life.’

“In the mornings, we have been finding charcoal grills, used syringes, and all sorts of ugly sights among the graves of leading Jewish leaders and thinkers,” is how Rabbi Haim Miller, former Deputy Mayor and head of the Movement for Jerusalem and its Residents, described the situation.. “It has become a nightclub and brothel for the Arabs of east Jerusalem who are destroying the gravestones and turning sections into dog dens. There is no greater shame for the Jewish State than this. It embarrasses me to state that in the largest Jewish cemetery in the world there is not even one toilet stall, and all of the faucets and benches have been stolen or destroyed.”

Mt. of Olives cemetery (Photo: Jeff Daube / ZOA, ICPHH)

The first Jews were buried on the mountain during the Bronze Age. With the construction of the Holy Temple on the adjacent mountain, the cemetery became popular among Jerusalem’s departed, because Jewish tradition holds that whoever is buried on the Mt. of Olives will not undergo painful torments during the resurrection of the dead (when the Messiah comes), and worms will not devour the body. Throughout the entire world, Jews are buried with a small sack of dust from the Mt. of Olives by their side.

In the late 1950’s, construction of a small mosque was begun in the Ras al-Amud Square on the old Jerusalem-Jericho road. Even before the Jordanian laws which were then applicable to the West Bank, construction of the mosque was never legalized. Only after the Six-Day War was the building completed, and a decision was made to maintain the status quo – the mosque would remain as built, but the land adjacent was declared State land because it is part of the ancient cemetery.

US Congressmen Jerrold Nadler and Eliot Engel (both from New York) with Conference of Presidents' Malcolm Hoenlein and ICPHH's Abe and Menachem Lubinsky (Photo Jeff Daube / ZOA, ICPHH)

However, when the siren for Memorial Day for the Fallen in Israel’s Wars and Terror Attacks recently echoed throughout the country, young people and the families of fallen soldiers standing in the ancient cemetery found it difficult to concentrate. Sounds of power hammers and machines for concrete were pounding away in the mosque adjacent to the cemetery fence, heard throughout the mountain. The laborers working so energetically were not doing so to deliberately disturb mourners, but simply because it’s the only day of the year they can build the illegal additions to the mosque without anyone disturbing them. The story of the mosque provides an instructive example of the Municipality of Jerusalem’s failure in handling open and transparent criminal acts.

More than 300 meters (984 feet) of the area belonging to the Mount of Olives cemetery has already been annexed to the mosque, which presently stands 10 paces from the plot belonging to the man who revived the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his family, and only a few meters from the graves of Menachem and Aliza Begin. The former Prime Minister refused to be buried in the plot reserved for the great leaders of the Jewish People (on Mt. Herzl) and requested that, “when the time comes, I ask to be buried on the Mt. of Olives, near Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barazani.” Imprisoned by the British, his two underground comrades killed themselves rather than be hung, and now Begin is buried in a simple plot overlooking the Temple Mount from afar, but adjacent to the mosque.

The area on which the mosque is built is considered especially prestigious due to its proximity to the site of the Holy Temple (Beit Hamikdash) and the price of a tiny piece of land (a plot for a grave) begins at $20,000 – to the Burial Society (Hevra Kadisha). The demand is so high that the gravestones are situated very close to one another, and sometimes the only way to place a stone on a grave (Jewish custom upon leaving a gravesite visit) is to throw it from afar.

Photo: Yair Altman

In October 2010, right-wing activist Arieh King filed a first complaint with the Jerusalem Municipality. A few months afterward, Ofir May, head of the Municipality’s Inspectorate, wrote to Legal Counsel Adv. Amnon Merhav and to the Municipality’s Chief Prosecutor Adv. Einat Ayalon, “In the eastern section of the city, there are several mosques constructed without building permits, constituting construction felonies. Criminal case files were opened for them, however, the enforcement processes did not succeed in applying the Law, due to the sensitivity involved.”

May continued, and stated that “In the past, I contacted the Municipality’s Attorney on the issue, and he contacted the Attorney General about this, (however), I do not know whether there was an answer or what it was. The issue has recently come up again due to the construction work going on without a permit, enlarging the mosque in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood. I wish to receive clear directives on how to handle the mosques.” As of now, these directives have still not been received.

Since then, the mosque has only become bigger, and expanded into the cemetery area. Although Jerusalem City Hall claimed that this involved “an internal renovation of the bathrooms and moving the faucet installations,” they did demand that the Waqf cease adding to the building. Since then, the construction work has been conducted at night and on weekends, with the building serving as lodging for illegals.

A Jerusalem Police official estimated that this is a deliberate policy so as not to inflame hostilities. “Here there is a super-explosive potential in one of the most flammable places in the whole world,” said the Police official. “For one building, it’s not always worth it to set fire to the entire area. Sometimes it’s easier not to enforce every violation.”

The official response from the Jerusalem Police was that “enforcing the construction laws is the Municipality’s responsibility. The Police emphasize that each time it was asked to help Municipal Inspectors in delivering injunctions or enforcing them, they were accompanied by police officers who made sure to execute them fully and completely.”

Jerusalem City Hall stated. “The Municipality operates according to the Law and pursuant to instructions from the State’s Attorney on handling construction infractions in religious institutions. There is a construction infraction on that site, which is being handled by the Municipality in court. Continued handling of the issue is in coordination with all of the relevant authorities.”

Meanwhile, what is saving the Mount is the fact that among other graves are also the parents of a number of very wealthy Jews from all over the world. The brothers Avraham and Menachem Lubinsky, businessmen from the US, recently came to visit their parents’ graves and were shocked by the situation. They established the “International Committee for the Preservation of Har Hazeitim” and began to exert heavy pressure on the Israeli government and the Jerusalem Municipality.

The Americans find it difficult to grasp the feeling of insecurity that visitors experience at the Mount – a feeling to which most Israelis apparently have become accustomed. The pressure that they are exerting is now beginning to bear fruit in the form of widespread renovation of destroyed gravestones, the installation of 137 security cameras throughout the cemetery, and the arrest of dozens of young Arabs for vandalism.

For now, the overall effect of rehabilitating the Mount is displacing some of the terrorist stone-throwing activities directed at Jews traveling to the Mt. of Olives. Each week, drivers are stoned on the A-Tur and Ras al-Amud roads, usually by bored adolescents. The International Committee for the Preservation of Har Hazeitim recently sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealing for an increase in the punishment to minors in the cemetery area, since they are usually detained and then immediately released.

“We are obligated to restore security and holiness to the Mt. of Olives,” declared American businessman Avraham Lubinsky, the Committee Chair. “In the majority of western countries and many US States, there is specific legislation requiring imprisonment for defilers of graves, up to several years in prison.”

The letter was signed by leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America, the National Council of Young Israel, Agudath Israel of America and the Orthodox Union, as well as the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. All of the organizations benefit from a very strong lobby in Israel and the US. If not for tradition and history, perhaps it is through politics that those buried on the Mt. of Olives will have their honor restored.

Vandalism (and assault) at the World's oldest Jewish cemetery

JPost is spot-on in this editorial about the World's oldest Jewish cemetery: The Mount of Olives. 

It is not difficult to imagine the deafening outcry that would have arisen had Jewish stone-throwers attacked Arab mourners and visitors to a major cemetery. The chorus of condemnation would have become shriller yet, had the attacks not been isolated but daily harassment and outright physical endangerment.

It is safe to assume that the violent assailants would have been castigated as despicable racists and that all-out manhunts would have been mounted to apprehend them.

But as it happens, the assailants are Arab while the mourners and visitors are Jewish. Hence there is no outcry, no condemnation, no manhunts and the word “racist” is on nobody’s lips. No one talks about the regular predations on Jews trying to reach Jerusalem’s ancient Mount of Olives Cemetery, regarded by many as the second holiest Jewish site anywhere.

It is almost as if brutal onslaughts and lynching attempts against Jews are only to be expected and even accepted as the norm.

It is a sad testament to an even sadder state of affairs that Diaspora Jews feel obliged to take action to preserve the world’s largest Jewish cemetery, while successive Israeli governments serially fail to stem lawlessness, vandalism and neglect there.

Read the whole thing.  The solution is really quite simple....

Arab Youth Use Jewish Cemetery as Playground Arab boys jump on Jewish graves in a recent video. Jewish sites expert: the problem is nearly 90 years old.

A recent video taken at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem shows young Arab men playing on the tombs by standing on top of them and jumping from grave to grave.

The offensive behavior was at first thought to be a new development in the long saga of deliberate desecration at the sacred site.

However, an expert on Jewish holy sites has revealed that the phenomenon is not new at all. In fact, Dr. Dotan Goren said, reports of similar behavior date back nearly 90 years.

Dr. Goren provided a newspaper clipping from August 1925 in which a letter writer expressed concern over Arab disrespect for the ancient Jewish cemetery.

“Whoever walks near the Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem towards evening will see the following: herds of animals grazing, Arab women making new paths to create a shortcut,” reader M. Lanberg wrote to Davar. "It is particularly joyful on the Sabbath. Groups of Arab youth jump from grave to grave for sport.”

He decried the phenomenon, saying, “Is there no institute in Jerusalem that, for the sake of the dear departed, can take care that the cemetery is not damaged or turned into a place for playing games and grazing sheep?”

Jewish MKs Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party recently visited the Arab neighborhood along the road to the Mount of Olives and asked Arab adults about the repeated desecrations of the holy site. Local adults admitted that youth repeatedly attack Jews along the road, but gave varying excuses for the the phenomenon, rather than offering to try to put a stop to their youngsters' behavior.

Israelis mapping every grave in Mount of Olives

The International Committee for the Preservation of Har HaZeisim calls for the support of people around the world to stop the desecration of this holy cemetery.


From AP:

A Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st-century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, a sprawling, politically sensitive necropolis of 150,000 graves stretching back three millennia.

The goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. That is supposed to allow visitors to find their way in the cemetery, long a bewildering jumble of crumbling gravestones and rubble surrounded by Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Beset for many years by neglect, it is among the oldest cemeteries in continuous use in the world.

Around 40,000 graves have been mapped so far by the team, which began work in 2008. They expect to finish recording all of the intact gravestones -- an estimated 100,000 in total -- by the end of next year. The rest are either so old they are unrecognizable or lie underneath later layers of burial.

Mappers look at aerial photographs, consult handwritten burial records dating back to the mid-1800s, walk along the rows of graves and dig through piles of dislocated tombstones, noting names and dates.

"This place has been used for burial since there have been signs of life in Jerusalem," said Moti Shamis, a member of the mapping team. "The cemetery is a mirror of the city -- in wartime, we see more graves. When new groups of Jews reach the city, the names on the graves change."

Like so much in Jerusalem, this project is linked to the city's fraught politics. The mappers are from an organization called Elad, affiliated with the settlement movement, which also works to move Jews into east Jerusalem in an attempt to prevent the city's division in any future peace deal.

Elad has made it its business to develop sites of Jewish importance in east Jerusalem, reinforcing the Israeli presence in the part of the city the Palestinians want as their capital.

Jews began burying their dead on the hill that later became known as the Mount of Olives about three millennia ago. It was a convenient site a short walk from the city walls. Over the centuries, burial here became linked to a prophecy in the Book of Zecharia according to which the Messiah would approach Jerusalem from the mount, splitting it in two. Those interred on the hill, this belief posited, would be the first to be resurrected.

The mount became, and remains, a sought-after place to be buried for Jews in Israel and abroad.

"As a place of burial it differs from almost every other on earth, in being, as no other is, a witness to a faith that is firm, decided and uncompromising until death," wrote Norman Macleod, a missionary, after a visit in 1864. "It is not therefore the vast multitude who sleep here, but the faith which they held in regard to their Messiah, that makes this spectacle so impressive."

The project is mapping only the Jewish cemetery, which includes several burial monuments from the time of the second Jewish Temple, about 2,000 years ago. Among the oldest graves that still bear names is one of a medieval scholar, Ovadia of Bartenura, an Italian who came to Jerusalem and died here around 1500.

The work of the mappers has solved several mysteries, one of them that of the missing grave of Shmuel Ben-Bassat.

Ben-Bassat was a soldier who died in combat in the war that surrounded Israel's creation in 1948. He was buried on Jan. 14 of that year, before Jewish forces lost the cemetery, along with the rest of east Jerusalem, to the Jordanian army.

For the next 19 years Jordan controlled the cemetery, paving over part of it to build a road, using gravestones to pave paths in a nearby military camp and abandoning the rest to disrepair. When Israel recaptured the Mount of Olives in 1967, the soldier's family could find no trace of him.

Going through old burial records as part of the new project, the mapping team discovered a note saying he had been interred "next to Gader Gurjis and in front of Deborah, the widow of Reuven Mirabi." Those graves still existed. Ben-Bassat now has a military gravestone.
...
Elsewhere in the cemetery lies Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man responsible more than any other for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, and a national hero in Israel. He was buried here in 1922. Nearby is Menahem Begin, buried in 1992 in a modest grave that makes no mention of the fact that he was Israel's prime minister.

Begin requested burial here, rather than in the country's national cemetery alongside other Israeli leaders, because he wanted to be close to two fighting comrades who killed themselves with grenades moments before they were to be hanged by the British in a Jerusalem prison in 1947.

AP fails to mention that Arabs continue to vandalize Jewish graves at Har HaZeitim today. The most recent incident was on November 6 with at least five tombstones smashed. This website has photos and videos documenting the destruction of graves happening now (including Arabic graffiti.) Much of the recent desecration is documented in this video created by an organization dedicated to protecting the ancient holy site:

The Mount of Olives - Har HaZeitim - is one of those areas on the east side of the Green Line that must remain under Jewish control. We saw how Jordan desecrated it during the 19 anomalous years that part of Jerusalem was Judenrein, and we see how Arabs will go out of their way to desecrate it today, with the tacit encouragement of the PA. 

The project to map the graves is very important. The project to protect it from Arab vandals is even more vital. But most important of all is to ensure that this hallowed ground where so many luminaries are buried remains, forever, in Jewish hands.

Illegal construction of a mosque by ancient Jewish cemetery

This past week I mentioned that Jewish graves at the Mount of Olives were vandalized by Arabs.

JTA also reported in that link, "At the same time, local Arabs began illegally expanding a mosque to within 15 feet of the grave of Menachem Begin."

Here is video of that mosque being built as the Arab workers ignoring the court order to stop:


The mainstream Israeli English language media is not reporting on this outrage; only Arutz-7.

Al Jazeera On the Kotel

Arabs Vandalize Kever of Yehoshua bin Nun

More than a thousand mispallelim from all over Israel who went up on Thursday to the kever of Yehoshua bin Nun in the Samaria village of Timnat Heres were shocked to find that Arabs had vandalized the area with Arabic graffiti.
This was not the first time that Arabs have vandalized the compound, but this time was particularly difficult, as entire walls in the compound were covered with the graffiti. The Jews were also surprised to discover that this year, unlike in previous years, dozens of local Arabs gathered at the graveside and firmly demanded that the security forces who were present stop the dancing of some youths who broke into song and dance. The officers approached the youths and asked that they refrain from dancing and singing, but they refused and continued to dance for several minutes.
Gershon Mesika, head of the Shomron Regional Authority who was unable to hide his shock at the graffiti, said: “Only barbarians can do such terrible things. People who are able to deface a holy place so badly do not deserve to be called civilized. If this was Jews desecrating a Muslim shrine, the whole world would speak out against it.”
The mass tefillah at the kever of Yehoshua took place to mark Asara B’Teves. The Yidden davened at the kever as well as at the kevorim of Yehoshua’s father Nun and of Calev ben Yefuneh which are nearby.
The thousands included men and women of all ages and all walks of life
The event was organized by the Shomron Regional Authority, the Shechem Echad organization, and the Shomron Religious Council. The Yidden were secured by soldiers belonging to the Ephraim Brigade.