Jewish cemetery in southwest France vandalized
(JTA) — About a dozen graves were vandalized in a Jewish cemetery in southwest France.
The vandalism took place over the weekend in the Jewish cemetery of Bayonne, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques area.
The damage was discovered on Sunday by Déborah Loupien-Suares, the president of the Jewish community of Bayonne and Biarritz, who was visiting the graves of her grandparents.
She tweeted that she was “angry and indignant” after seeing the desecration of the cemetery and called for those responsible to be punished.
She told local media that “significant damage” was inflicted on the gravestones and that several were smashed and broken. A commemorative plaque for a girl who was deported during World War II also was smashed, according to the French daily LeParisien.
Loupien-Suares said there were no anti-Semitic phrases or inscriptions at the cemetery, and called for an investigation “to be carried out calmly.”
She told LeParisien she would file a complaint with local police on Tuesday.
The post Jewish cemetery in southwest France vandalized appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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