Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

UN Agency Agrees To Hold ‘Jewish Israel’ Show

UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, said it will delay for six months the opening of an exhibition on the Jewish presence in the land of Israel.

UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova had said Jan. 15 in a letter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the exhibit, titled “The People, the Book, the Land — 3,500 years of ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel,” which the center organized along with the governments of Canada and Montenegro, would be postponed indefinitely. She said the decision arose out of UNESCO’s support for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. UNESCO now says the exhibit is scheduled to open in June, pending final discussions with the Wiesenthal Center, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, confirmed to the AP that his group was negotiating with UNESCO over the exhibit.

He said the Wiesenthal center opposed changes to the text on the some 30 illustrated panels in the exhibit, but there were still discussions regarding some of the photos, the AP reported.

Complaints by the 22 Arab member states led to the postponement of the exhibit, according to UNESCO. The U.N. agency also said it needed extra time to revise “unresolved issues relating to potentially contestable textual and visual historical points” that member states could perceive as “endangering the peace process.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the postponement of the exhibit earlier this week, saying: “It would not harm the negotiations. Negotiations are based on facts, on the truth, which is never harmful.”

The Obama administration also expressed “disappointment” with the cancellation.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.