Hundreds of Jewish graves were defaced in a cemetery in Sarre-Union, France, in what the country’s interior minister is calling “a despicable act.”
“We express the strongest condemnation of the desecration of hundreds of graves in a Jewish cemetery,” Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a news release about Thursday’s vandalism.
“Everything will be put in place to identify, arrest and send to justice the perpetrators of these ignominious acts,” he added. “The French Republic won’t allow another act against our values.”
Photos from the cemetery showed gray stone and glossy marble headstones lying on the ground as if they’d toppled over.
About 300 headstones were damaged, a source close to the investigation told Agence France-Presse.
Calling the site “an image of desolation,” Philippe Richert, president of the Alsace region, told AFP why he felt the damage was the certain work of vandals: “One doesn’t knock over heavy steles like that dating from the 19th century very easily. It was a deliberate act of destruction.”
Prime Minister Manuel Valls sent out a tweet calling the destruction “a vile, anti-Semitic act, an insult to the memory” and promised “everything will be done to find those responsible.”
This is not the first time the Sarre-Union cemetery, located about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of the German border, has been targeted. In 1988, about 60 Jewish headstones were knocked over, and 54 grave markers were damaged in 2001, AFP reported.
The vandalism comes within weeks of other Jewish cemeteries being targeted around the world.
In Warsaw, Poland, on January 31, someone wrote “Jews for slaughter” on the fence outside one of the continent’s largest Jewish burial grounds, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
And in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Saturday, a vandal spray-painted a swastika on a headstone and knocked over two others, breaking them, in the Jewish section of the Southern Cemetery, the New Zealand Herald reported.
The cemetery attack in France comes after two high-profile acts of violence against Jews in Europe. Following last month’s attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, a gunman killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris. Over the weekend, a gunman attacked a free speech forum in Copenhagen before shooting several people outside a synagogue.