France Presses Probe of Cemetery Desecration : Racism: Sixty police investigators are sent to southern town. Graves in Italy are vandalized.

Sixty police investigators have been sent to a southern town to help hunt for the vandals who desecrated graves and mutilated a corpse at a Jewish cemetery, the French government announced Wednesday.

Officials also condemned an assault on a high school teacher who had talked about the desecration with her class.

And still another case of desecration of a Jewish cemetery was reported Wednesday. In Naples, Italy, officials disclosed that vandals dugs up tombs and overturned 20 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery. The desecration occurred about 15 days ago but was made public only this week by leaders of the Jewish community there.

Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly observed a minute of silence to mark the wave of racist and anti-Semitic incidents that began with last week’s desecration in Carpentras, France.

“Racism and anti-Semitism are not opinions,” said Assembly President Laurent Fabius. “They are crimes.”

Prime Minister Michel Rocard told the Assembly that 60 investigators have been sent to Carpentras to reinforce those already working on the case. Police are working doggedly to solve the racist and anti-Semitic crimes, he said.

Incidents of racial or political vandalism have occurred almost daily since the Carpentras desecration was discovered May 10.

On Monday, two masked men beat up Christiane Guiard, a high school teacher, after she devoted a class to a session on racism in response to the cemetery desecration.

Guiard, a history and geography teacher at the Emile Zola College of Royan, near Bordeaux, said the intruders entered her home and beat her.

The attack followed several threats in anonymous telephone calls, she said in the hospital.

The men “told me ‘Dirty Jew, dirty Arab, you were warned,’ ” said Guiard, 41. “The reason? I see one. It’s racism,” she said.

Muslim immigrants also have been the target of racist attacks. Guiard is neither Jewish nor Arab.