Suspect Identified In Anti-Semitic Graffiti Attack On Jewish Center In Russia
A swastika Image by Wikimedia Commons
(JTA) — Russian authorities identified a suspect in the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti on the wall of a Jewish center in the Russian village of Lyubavichi, the cradle of the Chabad Hasidic movement.
The suspect was a man from Murmansk, a city located hundreds of miles north of Lyubavichi, according to Yuri Ivashkin, the mayor of the village in western Russia.
“We knew immediately this was not the work of a local,” Ivashkin told JTA. “Police are still working on identifying an accomplice.”
The inscriptions, reading “Jews out of Russia, our land” and featuring the Baltic variant of the swastika, were spray-painted on the wall of the Hatzer Raboteinu Nesieinu Belubavitch earlier this month.
Ivashkin’s statement followed a ceremony in which several of Russia’s senior-most rabbis attended the dedication of a perimeter fence around one of the Jewish cemeteries in and around Lyubavichi.
The rabbis, including Yitzhak Kogan of the Moscow synagogue Bolshaya Bronnaya, and Jehoshua Raskin, traveled Sunday from Moscow to the village of 200 people to celebrate the completion there of a preservation project headed by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, or ESJF, a nonprofit organization that has completed similar projects in 102 cemeteries across Eastern Europe with funding from the German government.
“Initiatives like these are vital because of neglect, economic and agricultural development, and vandalism,” said Rabbi Isaac Schapira, the founder and chairman of the ESJF board. The project in Lyubavichi was his organization’s first in Russia since its founding in 2015.
Joseph Popack, a Jewish-American donor, funded the new fencing at a cost of $100,000.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
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