Michael Z. Wise at Tablet does the shoeleather work I should have done after spotting Frank Gehry’s vanishing act last week:
After years of protests and an unsuccessful legal challenge, architect Frank Gehry has pulled out of a project to build a Jerusalem counterpart to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance that is slated to stand on a site that was once part of an ancient Muslim cemetery.
“We are no longer involved in it,” said Craig Webb, the design partner in charge of the project for the firm of Gehry Partners. He said the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which opened its original Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in 1993, no longer had the right to use Gehry’s design and was considering alternatives. The center’s website currently reads “please check back soon” under a page devoted to the Jerusalem initiative….
Gehry’s withdrawal is but the latest in a series of obstacles to have come in the project’s way. Sheikh Raed Salah, a leader of Israel’s Islamic Movement, has charged that the construction would desecrate an Islamic holy site and, together with Jerusalem Arab families whose ancestors are buried in the Mamilla Cemetery, he petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to block it.
