Neighborhood residents are convinced the bathroom-cum-toolshed, which they call "the monster," was just a pretext for building an edifice that would some day serve as a restaurant.
By Nir HassonHave the Tourism Ministry and the Jerusalem municipality buried treasures from the Second Temple under a giant lavatory? That possibility is just one of the problems cited by opponents of a plan to improve a spring in the city's Ein Karem neighborhood, at one of Israel's most important Christian tourism sites.
The spring is the fourth most important site in the Holy Land to Christian pilgrims, after Jerusalem's Old City, Bethlehem and Nazareth, and about one million people visit it each year. According to Christian tradition, this is the place where Elizabeth, John the Baptist's mother, and Mary, Jesus' mother, met when both women were pregnant. But for the last two years, these visitors have been greeted by the adjacent sight of a huge, sealed building that, according to the approved plan, is supposed to serve as a public lavatory and a municipal warehouse for gardening tools.
 | “Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem,” Francesco Hayez (1867). |
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It's hard to see why a combined bathroom and toolshed needs a 314 square meter building, but the plan is to build a large plaza on its roof, as the building is below the level of the road. The plaza would then be linked to the road by filling the intervening wadi with tons of earth.
A year ago, Yossi Havilio - then the city's legal adviser - ordered work on the project be halted after discovering serious violations of the building ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
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