NEW ORLEANS, LA — Police responded to a vandalism call at the Hebrew Rest Cemetery late last night, where they discovered that the gate to the Jewish cemetery was broken, the sign was torn down, and many gravestones were covered in spray paint.
Of the nine grave markers that were painted, seven were marked with graffiti portraits of Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister of Israel. The eighth was painted with a Star of David and a flower, and the ninth with Peres’s quote, “Israel is moving from the realm of poetry to the realm of prose.”
Jewish community leaders are unsure how to react to this act, which was clearly a vandalization of Jewish graves, but also somehow a celebration of the engineer of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty and the Oslo Accords.
As of yet, police have no leads on potential suspects; the vandals were thorough and left no trace of their identities as they at once defiled the final resting place of many of the ancestors of some of the city’s notable Jewish families and also honored the legacy of the Nobel Prize winner who served Israel for over 70 years.
The community has launched a campaign to raise money to restore the cemetery as the police search for the culprits who desecrated the Jewish site while also commemorating the man who was the last living link to Israel’s founding generation.
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