Paris Truck Crash That Toppled Jewish Gravestones Ruled Accidental
(JTA) — A truck belonging to the city of Paris plowed through a Jewish cemetery near the French capital and toppled 13 tombstones in what authorities said was an accident.
No one was injured in the incident, which occurred March 20 in the northeastern suburb of Pantin.
The driver of the municipal truck veered into the Jewish cemetery late in the afternoon to avoid hitting a car whose driver failed to give the right of way to the truck, the Consistoire of Paris wrote in a statement Friday.
The Consistoire is the state-recognized Jewish group in France responsible for providing religious services to members of the Jewish community, including burials.
The SPCJ, the French Jewish community’s security service, confirmed that the incident was not a deliberate attack on Jewish headstones. The Consistoire informed the families whose relatives’ graves were destroyed in the incident.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO