More Israeli Graves Defaced; 2 Confess in Haifa

Israeli police Thursday said they have arrested a mentally deranged Jew on suspicion of desecrating graves in the central town of Lod, the latest in a wave of attacks on Jewish cemeteries in Europe and Israel.

Israel Radio said the 24-year-old suspect is believed to have smashed flowerpots on graves in a Lod military and a civilian cemetery. His name was not disclosed, and police described him as insane.

Earlier, two Jewish followers of a messianic cult admitted to vandalizing 250 Jewish graves in the northern city of Haifa, police said.

The two confessed that they daubed the graves with graffiti reading “The Arabs Will Kill the Jews” in hopes that Arabs would be suspected and that Israelis would react by uniting against what one suspect called “danger from Arab nations,” police said.

The Sunday vandalism was believed to have been inspired by the defacing of graves in the southern French town of Carpentras days earlier. The French incident was followed by desecrations of Jewish graveyards in France, Poland and Sweden.

There were new incidents of cemetery desecrations reported Thursday in France and Switzerland.

At the Jewish cemetery of Hobourg-Wihr, near Mulhouse in eastern France, officials said they found pro-Nazi statements, including “Live Hitler and Dachau” and “Death to the Jews,” painted on the walls.

At a non-Jewish cemetery near the western French city of Nantes, authorities discovered tombstones painted with slogans against Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme rightist National Front, who has been widely blamed for creating a national mood of racism.

The inscriptions found on sculptures and tombstones included “Death to Le Pen” and “Le Pen Is a (Waffen) SS.”

“The graffiti indicates either an act of vengeance after Carpentras or a gratuitous act given the climate of violence in which we live,” remarked Rene Pauley, the deputy mayor of Saint-Herblain.

In the hamlet of Villaret, Switzerland, police said vandals spray-painted Nazi swastikas and Jewish Stars of David on 18 tombstones in a cemetery earlier in the week. However, police said none of those buried at the cemetery were Jewish. Most of the graves were those of Protestants.

The European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, France, said Thursday in a resolution that it is “deeply shocked” by the desecration in Carpentras.

It said the recent attacks “represent a grave affront to all civilized societies.” And it called for all Europeans to “rise above traditional divisions” in a war against escalating racism and anti-Semitism.

Thousands of French Jews were said to be considering emigrating to Israel after the spate of anti-Semitic acts. The Jewish Agency, an international group that helps Jews emigrate to Israel, has received about 2,000 requests for aid since the Carpentras incident.