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July 23, 2010
Graves spark protests
Neturei Karta brings complaint to Toronto Jews.
PAUL LUNGEN CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
You can find them outside the White House, protesting the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington, D.C. You can find them comforting wounded jihadis posing as humanitarians bringing aid to Gaza. You can find them embracing the Iranian president, who has called for the destruction of Israel. But Yaen Vered didn’t expect to find them – Neturei Karta activists – in front of his apartment building in North York, bullhorns at the ready, protesting the removal of allegedly Jewish remains at a construction site in Ashkelon, Israel.
Vered, the Canadian representative of the Israel Antiquities Authority, was targeted because of the Neturei Karta belief that the IAA desecrated Jewish graves. The human remains in question were discovered during construction of an emergency wing for the Barzilai Medical Centre.
Vered said the protesters have appeared twice at his apartment building on Yonge Street, and promised to protest again. Although their numbers are small, five the first time, 10 the second, they’re a nuisance, Vered said, and they’ve succeeded in intimidating his family. They’ve been asked to move along by shopkeepers and police, but Vered expects them to be back.
The demonstration at his apartment more or less coincided with a similar gathering of 2,000 Charedim outside the White House during Netanyahu’s recent visit. JTA reported that Rabbi David Niederman, a spokesperson for the Central Rabbinical Congress, said the protesters wanted to raise awareness of the alleged desecration of ancient graves in Ashkelon and Jaffa, to distinguish between Jews and Israel and to accuse Israel of suppressing protesters who disapprove of the excavations.
Vered’s first inkling that trouble might be brewing came in late June, when he received a phone call from someone in New York complaining about the treatment of the Ashkelon graves. Shortly afterward, he received a local call claiming that Canadian Friends of the IAA had given $2.5 million to the hospital in Ashkelon.
“First, we don’t have that kind of money,” Vered said, “and secondly, we didn’t have anything to do with Ashkelon.”
Vered said he tried to reason with the demonstrators, but he doesn’t believe they were interested in hearing what IAA experts found when they were finally called to the Ashkelon site.
On confronting the protesters, he saw a variety of signs equating Zionism with “thuggery,” condemning Israel, saying “Dissolve the state of Israel,” and the “Bones are not yours.” Some of the signs directed onlookers to the website nkcanada.ca. On the home page is a Neturei Karta rabbi visiting a wounded blockade-running “humanitarian.” The website includes a photo of a handful of demonstrators, apparently outside Vered’s apartment. The photo caption reads: “Orthodox Jews protest outside of the office of the Canadian Friends of the Israeli Antiquity Authorities against the desecration of ancient graves by archeologists in the ‘state’ of Israel. Prayer vigils and demonstrations were held in the towns of Jaffa, Ashkelon, Zippori and Nazareth.”
Efforts to reach Neturei Karta for comment on the protests were unsuccessful.
Vered said that while the they were oblivious to his explanation, some of the protesters seemed to be listening to his side of the story. He says that the bodies were not found as part of an archeological dig, but during construction of a hardened underground emergency wing for the hospital in Ashkelon, to replace one that is exposed to rocket attack from Gaza.
Construction was halted and plans were being explored to redesign the wing to avoid the potentially Jewish cemetery, he said, but experts examining the bones concluded they’re not Jewish, dating from the first century BCE to the third and fourth centuries CE.
The graves, which have been reburied, bore the characteristics of pagan rituals, not Jewish ones, he said. They were plastered with paintings and contained artifacts that were pagan in nature. They were oriented to Dagan, the Philistine sea god, not toward Jerusalem. And a pagan altar donated by a Roman family was found at the site.
There is also some irony in the situation, Vered, continued. “Neturei Karta in the past had a better relationship with the IAA, and the IAA was accused by many secular Israelis of collaborating with the Atra Kadisha, which deals with preserving Jewish burial sites, who keep an eye on all we do and to see if we’re harming any graves.”
The original version of this article can be found at cjnews.com.
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