Dear All,
As was previously updated, Israel will participate this year in the WLM competition. We wish to update you with our progress.
Our
first objective was to try and obtain a list of national monuments.
This proved to be much more difficult than originally anticipated.
According to Israeli antiquities law, any building or object created or
built before 1700 is a protected archeological object. Buildings which
were built afterwards were not protected. After the demolishing of the
Herzaliya Gymnasium in 1962 [1], and
following public protests, the National Council for Preservation of
Heritage Sites was created. This body did not have any legal capacity to
protect landmarks, and worked at advancing public awareness of national
heritage sites. Only in 2011 was legislation passed protecting such
landmarks. According to the legislation, the National Council will
create lists of protected sites which will approved by the local
municipalities in order to come into force. This resulted in local
politics being involved, and most of the lists were never approved due
to local economic interests.
We approached the Council, and requested their
co-operation. We have held several meetings with the Council, and
eventually convinced them to join us in the project. (One of the
difficulties was that the Council itself has an annual photography
competition, and the WLM would compete with it.) Upon receiving the
blessing of the general manager of the National
Council, we discovered that the Council itself does not have the lists
of monuments. With the assistance of the Council, and after a week of
searching, they were able to locate some of the lists, which are
uploaded to the project page on Wikipedia [2].
This will be the first time that the list of national monuments will be available online to the Israeli public.
We have also contacted several sponsors, and currently await their decision to sponsor the competition.
We have contacted the largest local amateur
photography school, and asked it to sponsor some of the events we are
planning as part of the competition. We will further update once these
events are finalized.
Regards,
Deror