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.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

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.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount