About the project
The Jerusalem Foundation supported creation of the Cardinal Albert Decourtray Memorial Garden on Mount Zion in 2000. The garden was named in memory of the former Archbishop of Lyons, France, who fought against anti-Semitism and advocated for openness toward the Church’s role in the Holocaust. (One of his first public acts upon becoming archbishop in 1981, was to pray at places where Jews were killed by the French pro-Nazi militia. In 1989, ignoring protests within Catholic ranks, he opened the archives of his diocese to expose the role of the church in hiding a former member of the pro-Nazi militia, Paul Touvier, after the war.) Cardinal Decourtray, who died in 1994, requested that a stone from Jerusalem be placed inside his coffin. The garden, which is located near the grave of Oskar Schindler, was designed by Eli Inbar to maximize views of the Silwan Valley and to incorporate the sculpture Three Points of View for Dialogue by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938). The sculpture, composed of three freestanding, black-and-white striped frames, is typical of Buren’s striped installations. Buren has written of this piece, “…it is a meeting point of various ways of thinking, living, believing. There are various ways, all of them come from various places, in the literal as well as the figurative meaning. They meet in a place situated a few meters from the frames, which point out where they come from. This meeting point is an exchange point as well as a discussion and reconciliation one.”
