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13 Tammuz 5761 - July 4, 2001 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Protests at Cemetery in Tiveria
by Y. Ariel

Scores of demonstrators arrived Monday (11 Tammuz) at the site of the old cemetery in Tiveria, in order to protest the intentions to dig there. The excavations were supposed to be conducted by the Antiquities Authority on behalf of the Church of Scotland but they were postponed at least for now.

Earlier, the chairman of the Internal Affairs Committee of the Knesset, Rabbi Moshe Gafni, warned the Prime Minister's Office about the serious developments which are likely to unfold on the site. He said that the excavations also violated the coalition agreement with UTJ.

In response, the government's secretary announced that the excavations would be postponed. Rabbi Gafni though is not satisfied with the announcement, and demands that a basic solution which will prevent excavations in all cemeteries in the country, especially in the old cemetery in Tiveria, be formulated.

Also this past Sunday, demonstrations were held in the plaza of the Church of Scotland protesting the intention to build a hotel and a church on the site. The demonstrators said that the protesting would be increased if the work continued. They noted that the graves of Amoro'im who lived in Tiveria, as well as the grave of Rebbi Yitzchok Nafcha, are located on the site slated for the building of the hotel, and said: "We won't let history be erased by the building of a hotel." The Antiquities Authority announced that the excavations on the site would be postponed to a later date and that the fate of the project could be determined only at the termination of the excavations.

Parallel to these developments, contacts on a parliamentary level between Rabbi Gafni and the Prime Minister's Office continued. The Education Minister's advisor, Chezi Shnelzon continued to attempt to prevent the diggings, and along with the Ministry for Internal Security warned that the excavations are liable to result in superfluous and stormy clashes at the excavation site. MK Yossi Paritsky of Shinui defended the decision to excavate on the site and said: "It is forbidden to let the chareidim hurt tourism in Tiveria, and forbidden to let an investment of 20 million dollars for the building of a hotel, a hostel and a church -- an extension to the existing one -- go down the drain."

As of now, construction on the area of the Church of Scotland has been halted. Rabbi Gafni demands that the Prime Minister's Office not take one-sided steps, in violation of the coalition agreement. He denounced the policy of postponing and re-postponing the diggings, and said that it must be clearly established that it is forbidden to conduct digs wherever there are graves and wherever the possibly of desecrating human bones exists. The feasibility of granting the Scots alternative grounds or finding another solution must be examined. "But we can't keep on postponing and re- postponing the issue and battling over it each time anew," he stressed.

The Federation for the Prevention of the Desecration of graves was involved in the efforts to prevent the desecration this past Monday. Its heads contacted every possible person or group which they thought might help postpone the diggings.

 

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