Jewish cemetery in Ioannina vandalized

The Jewish cemetery in Ioannina has been vandalized for the second time in under a month, the Jewish community of the northwestern city reported on Friday, expressing its “sadness and abhorrence” for such acts of “sacrilege against the space and its memory.”

It said that a grave was smashed in “almost exactly the same way” that another had been destroyed a few days earlier.

“It is a sad event in a city where the Jewish community left a mark, where it coexisted harmoniously for centuries and where a handful of its remaining members are a part of its present,” the Jewish Community of Ioannina said in a statement.

“Antisemitism targets even the dead. For the second time in less than a month a tomb was found vandalized at the Jewish cemetery of Ioannina. The vandals chose the period of the High Holidays of the Jewish faith for the manifestation of their antisemitic hatred with the hideous act of removing the tombstone of a grave. Shame!,” the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece said in a separate statement on Friday.

“The state as well as the local authorities need to take all necessary measures for the safety of the Jewish Community and its sacred sites all over Greece, and particularly in Ioannina, where the Jewish cemetery has been the target of hatred attacks repeatedly in the past. Let the dead rest in peace!,” it added.