More than 1,000 Israeli police were deployed in Jerusalem on Thursday to protect an expected 5,000 participants in the city’s annual ‘Shame Parade’.

The parade was scheduled to start at 4 pm in West Jerusalem’s Independence Garden and to end in the Rose Garden, opposite the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said the hundreds of officers also included border police units and police volunteers.

‘We protect the marchers and are here to make sure that there won’t be any unusual incidents along the route,’ he said.

He said he knew of no requests for counter-demonstrations.

Meanwhile, Ynet reports that some 20 right-wing activists have gathered before the Jerusalem Convention Center to protest the Parade, and the protesters have four donkeys with them. One of them has a sign which says, “Jerusalem is proud of its soldiers, not its sick.”

The Jerusalem parade is far more controversial than its Tel Aviv counterpart, the largest parade in the Middle East. This June it attracted at least 70,000 participants.

But Jerusalem’s Charedi deputy mayor, Itzhak  Pindrus of the United Torah Judaism party, asked police for a permit to hold a counter-demonstration featuring donkeys, to protest the ‘beastly’ nature of Toeiva.

Police offered a compromise allowing the Charedi protesters to march with cardboard figures.

The Jerusalem municipality was anxious to emphasize that the deputy mayor’s protest was a private initiative, but Pindrus insisted that although it did not gain municipality support, it represented a wide section of the population

(Source: Ynet / M&C)