A number of tombstones were overturned in an historic Jewish cemetery in New York, police said Sunday, the latest in rising number of apparent anti-Semitic incidents across the United States.
Officers were called to the Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn on Saturday evening to investigate the vandalized graves, and the department’s hate crimes division has been notified, an NYPD spokesman said.
Police said they’d verified five overturned headstones, while New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind told reporters on Sunday that at least 40 headstones had been toppled. The discrepancy could not be immediately explained.
There has been a rash of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries and 122 bomb threats called in to Jewish organizations in three dozen states since early January. Disgraced former journalist Juan Thompson is accused of making eight of those bomb threats, authorities revealed on Friday.
Hikind said a Jewish resident of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood was walking past Washington Cemetary on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when the resident noticed gravestones that appeared to be out of place.
The resident waited until sunset on Saturday, the end of the Sabbath, and then reported the disturbance to the Shomrim, a neighborhood watch group that patrols several heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
Police were alerted, and investigators arrived Saturday night and Sunday morning to check the graveyard.
‘In light of everything going on in the country we wanted to see what was going on,’ Hikind said at an impromptu press conference on Sunday morning. ‘The police commissioner was down here, the crew chiefs, the bias unit was down here and they’re taking it seriously.’
‘In the cemetery there are many tombstones that clearly have been pushed over, clearly vandalized,’ Hikind continued. ‘We are not talking about tombstones that are naturally lying down, there are some of those. All you gotta do is walk in there and see that something is just not right.’
Washington Cemetery, which is predominantly Jewish, was founded in 1850, and became a Jewish burial ground as early as 1857.
In 2010, Washington Cemetery was also targeted by vandals, who covered as many as 200 gravestones in graffiti and toppled them over, the New York Post reported at the time.
On Sunday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo responded to the cemetery vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish institutions while on a visit to Jerusalem.
Speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Cuomo says the recent incidents ‘violated every tenant of the New York state tradition.’ He said the state has posted rewards and put together a special police unit to combat the phenomenon.
‘New York state by its definition is a celebration of diversity, it accepts all, we believe in the spirit of inclusion and we live by discrimination of none. New York’s principles are built on a rock they will not change and the political wings will not change them,’ he said, alongside Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
About 100 headstones were recently overturned in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. That came about a week after a similar crime in Missouri.
On Thursday, about 16 headstones were toppled and several other defaced at a Jewish cemetery in Rochester, New York, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported.
In Indiana, an apparent gunshot fired into a synagogue Tuesday has drawn the attention of the FBI.
Cuomo, who returns to New York Monday, will also meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tour the Western Wall and attend a security briefing at Jerusalem’s Old City Police Headquarters.
He’ll also host a New York State-Israel Economic Development working lunch with the mayor of Jerusalem.
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