After Vandals Strike, Repairs Begin
In the days following New Year’s, New Jersey’s Poile Zedek Cemetery was visited by vandals who knocked over nearly 500 tombstones on two separate sprees of destruction.
The last tombstones were toppled in New Jersey a day before different vandals hit Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago the night of January 5. Dozens of gravestones were graffitied with blue-and-white swastikas and with antisemitic slurs.
As of press time no one had been apprehended in the Chicago incident, though the police had already deemed it a hate crime.
In New Jersey, the New Brunswick police apprehended four teenagers accused in the Poile Zedek incident. The police there said that “there’s nothing to indicate it’s a bias crime.”
The community began repair work Sunday, with a thorough cataloging of the damage — helped along by a local Boy Scout troop. The Forward’s Julian Voloj was on hand to capture the scene in images.
The pictures show the gravestones, as well as Linda Edenson Cohen and Adele Barnett, who were visiting the destroyed gravestone of Barnett’s great-grandmother.
For more photos from the Poile Zedek Cemetery, see Julian Voloj’s slideshow here.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30