Sunday, April 01, 2007

Jewish graves destroyed overnight in France

What can you say about a hatred so deep that it extends to being unleashed upon the dead? From Yahoo France today we read of the latest desecration of Jewish graves in a Lille cemetary in the North of France [translated from the original French]:

50 graves in the jewish quarter of Lille-Sud’s cemetery were desecrated overnight on Saturday evening through Sunday morning, an act that has evoked numerous condemnations and has led to a large police mobilization to rind those responsible.
No inscriptions were found in the cemetery but “51 graves were damaged…, some were turned over, others were shattered”, the press was told by the District Attorney for the Republic of Lille, Philippe Lemaire, invoking “the first case of this scale in the region.”
At least one grave was broken and the steles of other graves – of whom some were broken – were turned over along a long column over 50 meters long, said an AFP journalist in the cemetery where several members of the jewish community went to survey the damage.
“I feel dread and sadness, when you see this it is indescribable”, said Franck Hanoh, a member of the Lille jewish community, not far from the smashed grave of his great-uncle.

“Since 2003, we have had a drop in anti-Semitic acts in the North, this incident therefore shocks us that much more”, underlines [Nord-Pas-de-Calais prefect Daniel] CanĂ©pa, who estimages the anti-semitic acts within their department each year as “five or six, especially insults, verbal aggressions or grafitti”.

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