Jerusalem Shows Low Tolerance for Museum

A new museum that ought to be a source of pride is a cause for dissention.

JERUSALEM -- At first glance, few places on Earth seem like better candidates for a museum of tolerance than Israel, where Jews and Palestinians kill one another almost daily and mutual hatreds seem rooted in the stony soil.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just one of the fault lines: secular Jews versus religious Jews, Israeli Arabs versus Israeli Jews.

In such an atmosphere, the formal launch Sunday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of its plan to build a Museum of Tolerance, drawing on the center's successful experience with its museum of the same name in Los Angeles, seemed almost like an impossible act.

"Promoting tolerance and human dignity is one of mankind's unfinished challenges," said Ehud Olmert, Jerusalem's mayor, who pushed hard to bring the museum to his city.

The proposed museum has long generated controversy in Israeli newspapers and magazines. Yad Vashem, the renowned Holocaust museum here, lobbied behind the scenes to discourage the center from going ahead with its plans, which Yad Vashem saw as competition. Some Jerusalem natives bristled at the proposed museum's design, by leading American architect Frank O. Gehry, which is unorthodox by the standards of this ancient city.
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