Vandals Strike Catholic Cemetery Near Jerusalem
Image by Haaretz
Vandals destroyed dozens of crosses at a cemetery in a Catholic monastery near Jerusalem.
The Latin Patriarchate announced the damage on Saturday when it filed a police report, though the vandalism at the monastery in Beit Jamal reportedly occurred in December, according to reports. The cemetery near the city of Beit Shemesh, located west of Jerusalem, also was vandalized in March 2014.
There are no suspects in the December vandalism. Similar attacks on Christian churches and other property in recent years has been blamed on Jewish extremists.
The patriarchate called on the police and other Israeli authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“We do hope that more efforts be made to educate all inhabitants of the country to respect each other despite their different religious backgrounds,” the patriarchate said in a statement.
Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international director of interreligious affairs, in a statement called the vandalism “an attack on Christianity and an assault on freedom of religion in Israel.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
