Polish Cops Nab Suspected Vandal at Jewish Cemetery
Overgrown: A neglected Jewish cemetery in the Polish town of Checiny. Image by COURTESY OF SZTETL.COM
Police officers in Poland arrested a man whom they said they had caught desecrating Jewish tombstones.
The suspect, who was not named, was arrested last week at the Jewish cemetery of Andrychow, 30 miles southwest of Krakow, the news site Wadowice24.pl reported Tuesday.
At the 18th-century burial site, he had knocked down 13 tombstones before police officers arrested him, according to the report. The man, who lives in Andrychow, has several prior convictions and is unemployed, the report also said.
Poland has about 1,400 Jewish cemeteries, which the Jewish community of 40,000 cannot afford to maintain, according to community officials. Although vandalism occasionally occurs, erosion, neglect and illegal construction account for more damage, several community officials told JTA.
In 2012, the Council of Europe adopted a non-binding resolution making national governments responsible for the care of Jewish cemeteries.
Last month, unidentified individuals smashed several headstones in Subotica, a Serbian city located 260 miles south of Andrychow.
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
