Florida Girl Makes Hundreds of Painted Rocks to Decorate Vandalized Headstones
(JTA) — A 6-year-old Florida girl has sent hundreds of rocks that she painted to place on headstones vandalized in Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia.
Ayel Morgenstern of Parkland took up the project after seeing a news report about the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in St. Louis and that one of the toppled headstones was that of her great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Pearl.
She reportedly sent more than 100 colorfully painted rocks to the cemetery in St. Louis, where Jewish day school students placed them on the gravestones. Another 150 rocks were sent to the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Ayel said she painted rocks with ladybugs for good luck and hearts for more love, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported. She is aware of the Jewish tradition of putting a small rock or stone on a gravestone that one visits to honor the deceased.
She also was planning to send rocks to the Waad Hakolel Cemetery, also known as the Stone Road Cemetery, in Rochester, New York, where several headstones were toppled.
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