by debra rubin
jta
Lorraine Mraz came to Poile Zedek Cemetery in New Brunswick, N.J., on Jan. 6, to bury her father only to find her mother’s headstone, along with hundreds of others, knocked over and vandalized.
“It didn’t seem real,” said the Edison, N.J., woman as she gazed down at the bouquet of fresh flowers on top of the grave of her father, Lawrence Nahama. Lying next to it was the broken headstone of her mother, Celia, who died in 1989.
Mraz was consoled by Olga Simcha Hamilton, who had come to the devastated cemetery after hearing that the gravestone of her father, Menachem Simcha — a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau — had also been pushed to the ground.
“This is my fourth time here today,” Simcha Hamilton said. “I had to keep coming back to prove to myself it really happened. Don’t these people understand the sanctity of a cemetery? To them it was just a bunch of stones with Jewish names on them.”
The women had come to the site along with many other relatives of those buried in the cemetery after hearing of the incident, in which 499 gravestones were vandalized, either knocked down or smashed.
Four New Brunswick juveniles, ages 15 to 17, were arrested in connection with the desecration. Investigators said it appears it was an act of vandalism rather than a bias crime.
“The facts as presently known do not indicate that the damage caused was an attempt to intimidate, target or harm the Jewish community,” said Middlesex County prosecutor Bruce Kaplan and New Brunswick Police Director Anthony Caputo in a Jan. 10 prepared release.
Row after row of gravestones, some of which dated back to the early 1920s, were leveled. Some were cracked or broken into pieces; others were thrown into haphazard piles.
About 75 percent of all gravestones in the cemetery were affected, but the Etz Ahaim section had virtually no marker left untouched, and broken glass was strewn across some of the headstones.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California