(JTA) Tom Tugend - The Simon Wiesenthal Center has petitioned a UN agency "to vigorously protest the barbaric desecration of Joseph's Tomb" by West Bank Palestinians. Shimon Samuels, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Paris office, wrote to the UN World Heritage Committee, UNESCO's watchdog for the protection of the world's cultural sites and historic monuments, after a group of Jewish chaplains found last month that the site "is now destroyed, the building cracked open with hammers, a huge hole in its dome, and the grave littered with trash and car parts." Recalling that the committee had condemned the destruction by the Taliban of two giant Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, Samuels concluded, "We would expect a similar condemnation of this new crime against cultural heritage."
2003-03-07 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive