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| Britain |
| Vandals Desecrate Jewish Graves in London |
| 2005-06-17 |
| LONDON (AP) - Vandals desecrated 86 tombstones dating to the 1870s in a Jewish cemetery in London, spraying some of them with Nazi swastikas and racial slurs while knocking them over, police said Thursday. London police said a large hole was made in the heavy wooden doors of a mausoleum building in West Ham Jewish Cemetery, and the structure was sprayed with swastikas. The mausoleum contained members of the wealthy Rothschild banking dynasty. Dozens of headstones around the mausoleum lay on the ground, some of them cracked or caved in. Jagged knee-high bases stood over the broken fragments of the stones, which previously stood about 5 feet tall. The barely legible inscriptions were mostly in Hebrew. "This was a despicable racist attack," detective Steve Lane said. Two of the damaged graves belonged to children aged 4 and 13 and had stood undisturbed since the 1870s, said Melvyn Hartog, head of burials for the United Synagogue, which maintains the cemetery and 10 others in the London area. "It's the lowest of the low," Hartog said of the vandals. The caretaker at the burial site, which opened in the mid-19th century, discovered the vandalism Sunday. By Thursday, cemetery workers had removed the swastikas and racial slurs from the mausoleum and graves. Daniel Stockdale, a 21-year-old mason who works for the United Synagogue, said the toppled headstones would be put upright but the broken ones would not be replaced with new stones. "It's so bad," Stockdale said. "These stones are irreplaceable." The attack is the third desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Britain this year. The first involved the painting of swastikas and SS signs on 12 gravestones in a Hampshire cemetery. Earlier this month, staff at a Jewish cemetery in Manchester, northern England, discovered that at least 96 graves had been toppled or smashed. Some of the stones, which are up to 70 years old, may have marked the graves of Holocaust survivors who came to Britain after the war, Jewish community leaders said. Earlier this week, Europe's top human rights watchdog expressed concern at the "considerable and steady rise of anti-Semitic incidents" in Britain. "While these incidents usually mirror tensions in the Middle East, representatives of the Jewish communities report that there now seems to be a higher level of background violence against these communities," said the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, the Council of Europe's body on combating racism. There were 532 anti-Semitic incidents in Britain last year, the highest figure in 20 years, said Michael Whine, a spokesman for the Community Security Trust, a Jewish group that works against anti-Semitism. Those incidents included life-threatening assaults, criminal damage to property, hate mail and abusive behavior. The CST did not yet have figures for this year. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 Bet there's a lot more anti-semitism there than 'islamophobia' - and i bet a lot of the anti-semites are Islamic. |
| Posted by: anon1 2005-06-17 02:44 |