Last week, more than 170 MPs and Peers including Lord Dubs and Luciana Berger, the Jewish MP for Liverpool Wavertree, signed a letter supporting the building of the memorial next to Parliament.
UK Holocaust memorial charities, including the Holocaust Educational Trust and Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, have also supported the project, as have Holocaust survivors living in the UK, especially praising its intended location.
In an article for the JC published on Monday, Barbara Weiss, the architect of the Wiener Library and one of the leaders of the “Save Victoria Tower Gardens” campaign, urged either a rethink of the design plans or for the memorial to be built elsewhere.
She called the current plan as intentionally aiming to alienate the park’s core users as part of a “sad strategy devised to heighten the experience of the new Memorial”, a plan she described as “perverse”.
Unesco has a fraught relationship with the Jewish community on account of its perceived bias against Israel.
On January 1, Israel and the United States of America officially withdrew from Unesco, after a series of highly controversial resolutions by the UN body.
Unesco resolutions repeatedly sought to deny Jewish links to both the entirety of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall and Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the second holiest site in Judaism.
At the time, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, described Unesco as “a body that continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem.”
