Unesco’s official adviser on World Heritage Sites has objected to the planned Holocaust Memorial Centre next to Parliament, saying it would “interrupt substantially" the park's views of Westminster Palace.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which Unesco founded and is one of three formal advisory bodies to its World Heritage Committee, wrote to Westminster Council opposing the application to build the memorial.
It claimed that the constructing it there “would have a massive visual impact” because it would kill a number of trees in Victoria Park Gardens.
The proposed location of the planned Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Palace of Westminster has led to some controversy, with some prominent Jewish peers, including Baroness Deech, Lord Haskell, Lord Turnberg and Lord Wasserman opposing its location.
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.”
