Polish Pogrom Memorial Probe Fails To ID Culprits

By JTA September 3, 2012

A yearlong investigation into anti-Semitic epithets painted on the memorial to the Jedwabne pogrom was closed.

The Lomza District Prosecutor ended the investigation on Monday after being unable to locate the perpetrators.

In August 2011, graffiti painted on the wall next to the monument in Jedwabne read “I do not apologize for Jedwabne” and “They burnt easily.” Vandals also defaced the monument itself, erected in the northeastern Polish town in memory of the hundreds of Jews burned alive in a barn by their Polish neighbors in 1941. The perpetrators also painted swastikas and SS symbols.

The Prosecutor’s Office in Lomza, a city approximately 90 miles from Warsaw, also closed an investigation into the destruction of the Jewish cemetery in Wysokie Mazowieckie without finding the perpretrators. Last March, vandals painted anti-Semitic slogans and Nazi symbols on the cemetery fence, monuments and graves. Vandals wrote that “This is Poland, not Israel.”

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