On Monday, June 21, a large demonstration of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews took place in front of the Israeli Embassy in Ottawa. The demonstrators protested the ongoing destruction by the Israeli government of an ancient Jewish cemetery in Jaffa.

The government began destroying the cemetery on Monday, June 14, to make room for a hotel parking lot. A team of archaeologists accompanied by four bulldozers began to mercilessly destroy the many burial caves at the site. Bones of holy Jewish sages from thousands of years ago were thrown about.

About one thousand protestors who arrived at the site were greeted with cruel and murderous blows by the police, both mounted and riot control divisions. Police shot tear gas canisters at members of the Eidah Chareidis Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem, led by Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch. Rabbi Sternbuch was temporarily blinded and came close to fainting. A number of Torah scholars were wounded; one of them began vomiting blood and was taken in an ambulance to the hospital. Police on motorcycles also randomly fired pepper spray canisters at Orthodox Jews walking in the nearby streets.

"Reputable archaeologists addressing a burial site do so with care and with hand shovels and brushes, not with tractors and bulldozers," said Rabbi Isaac Weiss, an eyewitness to the events.

Dr. Bernard Fryshman of the Conference of Academics for the Protection of Jewish Cemeteries reported that suitable engineering alternative had been provided to all of the burial sites recently excavated in Ashkelon, in Nazareth and now in Jaffa.

The Central Rabbinical Congress of the USA and Canada has already held several demonstrations against the desecration of these holy sites, the most recent of which took place on Tuesday, June 15 in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York.

“We see the Israeli government’s behavior as only symptomatic of a larger problem," said Rabbi Eliezer Brull, an organizer of the present demonstration in Ottawa. "According to the Torah and the Talmudic Sages, ever since the destruction of the Temple 2000 years ago, Jews have been in exile by Divine decree and were forbidden from re-establishing themselves as a nation until the coming of the messiah. The Zionist ideology is thus fundamentally anti-Torah. Not only has Zionism denied the fundamental Jewish belief in Heavenly Redemption; it has created a pseudo-Judaism which replaces the Torah with nationalism.

“It should therefore come as no surprise that such a so-called Jewish state digs up ancient Jewish graves. In fact, the graves they desecrate are those of the very same Talmudic Sages whose guidelines the Zionists reject.

"However, even if this state were to begin showing respect for Torah and Judaism, we would have to remember that the state’s very foundation contradicts the Torah, and as Torah Jews, we can never reconcile ourselves to it,” Rabbi Brull concluded.