Up to 100 gravestones vandalised at Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia

Police said on Sunday that more than 100 headstones had been vandalised at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, just a week after a similar incident was reported at a Jewish burial ground in suburban St Louis.

According to Jim McReynolds, a detective for the Philadelphia Police Department, at least 75 to 100 headstones at Mount Carmel Cemetery were discovered knocked over Sunday morning. Several of the headstones were broken.

A man visiting Mount Carmel Cemetery in the Wissinoming section of the city called police at 9:40am on Sunday to report that three of his relatives’ headstones had been knocked over and damaged.

“The cemetery was inspected and approximately 100 additional headstones were found to be knocked over” apparently sometime after dark Saturday, a police spokeswoman said in a statement.

A criminal mischief-institutional vandalism investigation will be conducted by the police north-east detectives division, she said.

The damage came less than a week after a Jewish cemetery in suburban St Louis reported more than 150 headstones vandalised, many of them tipped over.

After the vandalism in Missouri, Governor Eric Greitens wrote in a Facebook post: “Anyone who would seek to divide us through an act of desecration will find instead that they unite us in shared determination. From their pitiful act of ugliness, we can emerge even more powerful in our faith.”

The Missouri incident prompted a response from Donald Trump, who had been criticised by Jewish groups and political opponents for a lack of comment on an increase in threats against Jewish community centres around the US and a White House statement to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day which did not mention Jews or Judaism.