37 tombstones desecrated at Jewish cemetery in France

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Palko Karasz

The Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim, north of Strasbourg, France, on Friday. The incident comes on the same week as a deadly attack at a Christmas market in Strasbourg.Credit Vincent Kessler/Reuters

French officials paid their respects Friday at a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg, where 37 tombstones and a monument to Holocaust victims had been defaced with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in the same week that a deadly attack that shook the nation. “When a place of recollection is desecrated, it’s the entire Republic that is sullied,” Christophe Castaner, France’s interior minister, wrote on Twitter after visiting the cemetery in Herrlisheim. “Everything is being done to identify and detain the authors of this desecration.” On Friday, local religious and government officials gathered at the ceremony in Herrlisheim. [More]