Mamilla Cemetery
[1][2][3] The cemetery, at the center of which lies the Mamilla Pool, contains the remains of figures from the early Islamic period,[4] several Sufi shrines and Mamluk-era tombs.
A plan to build a Museum of Tolerance on part of the cemetery grounds, announced in 2004, aroused much controversy and faced several stop work orders before being given final approval in July 2011.
"[13][14] A similar description appears in James Turner Barclay's The City of the Great King (1857) and he gives the meaning of Ma'man Illah (or Ma-min-ullah, as he transcribes it) as "What is from God!
[22][23] Religious warriors or mujahideen who died in the battles for control over Jerusalem with the Byzantines in 636 and the Crusaders in 1137 were buried in the cemetery,[18] including, according to tradition, some 70,000 soldiers of Saladin.
[25] Al-Quraishi, a famous Sufi mystic said to have had miraculous healing powers, immigrated to Jerusalem from Andulasia by way of Fustat and garnered a school of disciples in his new home that numbered some 600 people before his death and burial in 1194.
[8] A structure known as al-Kebekiyeh (or Zawiya Kubakiyya), a one-room square-shaped building covered with a dome and incorporating architectural materials from the Crusader era was built during this period.
"[26] Other notables buried in Mamilla and recalled by Mujir al-Din include two founders of zawiyas in Jerusalem – Nasr ed-din Mohammad, one of the "ten emirs of Gaza", and Shaykh 'Omar, a Moroccan of the Masmoudys, El Modjarrad tribe.
[28] Burials in the cemetery ceased early in the period of British rule over Mandate Palestine (1918–1948), following the 1927 decision by the Supreme Muslim Council, who oversaw the administration of waqf properties, to preserve it as a historic site.
Baruch Katinka, a Jewish contractor hired to oversee the project, wrote in his memoirs that when the Mufti was informed of the discovery, he said to quietly rebury the bones elsewhere, as he feared Raghib al-Nashashibi, his political rival and the mayor of Jerusalem, would issue a cease work order.
[22] A November 1945 article in The Palestine Post reported on plans of the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) and the Government Town Planning Adviser to build a commercial center on cemetery grounds and to transfer remains buried in the areas to be developed to a "40 dunams walled reserve" centered around the tomb of al Sayid al Kurashi, ancestor of the Dajani family.
[22][35][36] In the 1950s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sensitive to how the treatment of waqf properties would be viewed internationally, criticized government policy towards the cemetery.
[38][39] Frank Gehry was appointed the architect, and the Jerusalem Municipality offered the SWC a 3.5-acre plot in the northern section of the original Mamilla cemetery where the parking lot was built in 1964.
[21] Between November 2008 and April 2009, crews of 40 to 70 people per shift worked in 8-hour stints, 24-hours a day to remove an estimated 1,000 skeletons from the site slated for construction.
[21][41] In 2010, Marvin Hier, rabbi and founder and dean of the SWC, said "Our opponents would have you believe our bulldozers are preparing to desecrate ancient Muslim tombstones and historic markers.
Let me be clear: The Museum of Tolerance is not being built on the Mamilla Cemetery, but on an adjacent 3-acre site where, for a half-century, hundreds of people of all faiths have parked in a three-level underground structure without any protest.
"[42] Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, said that, "contrary to what Rabbi Hier said, that parking lot was built over a cemetery, part of it.
[44] A new design for the museum drafted by Chyutin Architects was approved by the city of Jerusalem in June 2011, receiving an official building permit from the Interior Ministry in July 2011.
[45] In October 2011, eighty-four archaeologists called on the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jerusalem municipality and the Israel Antiquities Authority to end construction of the Museum of Tolerance.
In a letter sent to the three bodies, the archaeologists argued that the establishment of the museum on the site of the Mamilla Muslim cemetery contradicted ethical standards in the archaeological world, as well as Israeli law.
[44] On 9 August 2010, 300 Muslim gravestones in the cemetery were bulldozed by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) in an area US Jewish human rights activists said was very close to the planned site for the Museum of Tolerance.
[47] The judge later issued an order prohibiting harm to ancient graves and mandating that the ILA coordinate work with the Israel Antiquities Authority and representatives of the Islamic Movement.
[51] Later that same year, fifteen gravestones in the cemetery were spray painted red with racist slogans reading "Death to the Arabs", as well as "price tag" and "Givat Asaf", the name of an Israeli outpost slated for demolition.
