Vandals have inflected serious damage on dozens of headstones at a Jewish cemetery near St. Louis, MO.
…The damage is at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery at Olive and Hanley. Police said the damage took place over the weekend.Some family members drove to the cemetery Monday evening to see if their loved one’s headstone was toppled, but the cemetery was closed.Karen Aroesty, the regional director for the St. Louis-area Anti-Defamation League, got a call about the vandalism around noon. She walked through the cemetery to see the damage for herself and said she was appalled. She hopes to work with investigators to figure out if this was a hate crime.
Though local investigators have no suspects identified yet, they suspect it was the work of an organized group.
Police would not say if they considered the vandalism to be a hate crime or not. It is believed some organization was behind the crime, meaning this was not the act of one individual, the report said.
The vandalism occurred the same day as 11 Jewish community centers received bomb threats. Federal authorities are investigating these incidents, to determine if they are connected to a disturbing wave of threats that began earlier this year.
In the wake of 11 new threats today against Jewish centers, from New York to New Mexico, the FBI said it is investigating, along with the Department of Justice, bomb threats to the centers across the country.Federal authorities are looking into threats communicated to at least 60 Jewish centers around the country this year. The threats started in January and the FBI began investigating later that same month. The threats have come in “different waves,” with more threats phoned in to centers today, according to one source familiar with the matter.The FBI said it is “investigating possible civil rights violations in connection with threats to Jewish Community Centers.”
President Donald Trump condemned anti-Semitic behavior:
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