Jerusalem, November 11, 2016
On the morning of November 8, 2016, the feast of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, Israeli settlers, members of the radical right organization “Ateret Cohanim,” which has proclaimed as its goal the liberation of the Holy Land from all non-Jewish elements, desecrated the Tomb of the Most Holy Theotokos in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, reports Sedmitza.ru, with reference to the French Orthodox site orthodoxie.com.
Jewish extremists destroyed the roof and smashed the fencing around the courtyard of the metochia at the Tomb of the Mother of God, located directly opposite the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. Then the extremists broke into the building.
The extremists committing this act of vandalism belong to the same faction which attempted to usurp the hospice of St. John near the Church of the Resurrection, belonging to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, in 1991.
Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, and Metropolitan Hesychios of Capitolina, Archbishops Aristarchos of Constantina and Isidore of Heliopolis, accompanying the primate of the Jerusalem Orthodox Church, expressed their resolute protest against the recurring provocations of Jewish extremists. The hierarchy of the Jerusalem Patriarchate has demanded that the police and justice authorities of the state of Israel ensure the safety of all churches in Jerusalem.
In collaboration with the Jerusalem Patriarchate the Israeli police forced the settlers to leave the places illegally occupied by them. The next day the demand to release the belongings of the Jerusalem Orthodox Church was confirmed by court ruling.
On the morning of Wednesday November 9, Patriarch Theophilos, accompanied by the Greek Consul Christos Sofianopoulos and the aforementioned bishops, during the course of a meeting with representatives of the Israeli police, expressed the desires that counsel on both sides work together to reach a guarantee of a higher degree of protection for places of pilgrimage from such assaults by extremists.
