Sephardic Heritage Museum Har Hazetim Grave Restoration Video

[Music] the museum is very active in restoration and when we went to israel we saw the state of the graves on harzid's team on the mountain of this is the mountain facing the old city of jerusalem over there there was 40 000 graves that were desecrated by the jordanians for the 19 years that they controlled it and they stayed in desecration till today so we went and we restored over 200 graves already on hazard team there's so many more thousands of graves on that mountain of our community that we must restore but we're taking them from rubble from just a stone going back to manuscripts and looking for where the location of the graves are somebody went there about 80 years ago he documented all the graves on the mountain and he wrote in this row all these graves exist in the next row and so on and so forth and we've restored almost 200 graves it's a sight to see the mountain is in rubble that old sudden you see these brand new graves pop up that people have been buried 150 years ago this is an example of what the graves look like before the museum comes to restore look at this spot here see this number five this is the fifth spot on our list to restore i was approached a few years ago actually by a good friend rabbi raymond sultan he offered me what i thought was a opportunity of a lifetime he gave me a list of rabbanim basic story is these were buried in the most lucrative spot in the world had as a team and because it's so lucrative so the tomah unfortunately sometimes uh you know resists in the arabs over the years desecrated the graves of the satyakim they presented to me in the ability to restore the graves that means to put a new stone to put exactly the wording that was on the original stone of restoring this grave is none other than the mother from israel and rabbi ilamanto from our community a great rabbi paid for the restoration of this grave my rabbi was a chamber and his rabbi was hakam israel so i saw on the list the mother of bahamas was available and i asked rabbi raymond can i can i restore the grave he says yeah it's yours uh and i jumped on it i do believe that by restoring the graves of the siddiqim besides the mitzvah of it but i do think that the uh tsaddik or the tsarnaev then becomes a an advocate for the person that restored the grave it's assad it's an anguish for the niftar that the grave is desecrated you know we have you know issues we want to make panason we have children that want to get married we want to have you know security everybody has their things and we need all the help we can get from the upper worlds i can't believe that there's still sadiq left on the list if i was able to afford i would have taken the whole list myself and i do recommend for all the members of the community take it when they're still available something that doesn't present itself every day it's a rare mitzvah and once it's done it's done we're waiting for the community to help us fund this project to restore the graves as our utmost respect that we can give to our great-grandparents to at least allow their graves their last resting place to be in the situation that it belongs to the good people at the sephardic heritage museum they're always giving us these rare opportunities to be part of something historical and great [Music] you