Vandals damage 100 headstones at Jewish cemetery, police say

Even from the air it looks chaotic, like someone has angrily scattered previously tidy rows of toy blocks.

A view from the ground shows a more somber reality -- scores of granite and marble tombstones, toppled and damaged in a historic Jewish cemetery at a time tensions in the nation's Jewish communities are already high.

A vandal or vandals toppled and damaged more than 100 headstones at the Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery in the St. Louis suburb of University City within the past week, police said Monday. Workers spent part of Tuesday using crane trucks to upright some stones and documenting which memorials will need replacing altogether.

Police are investigating the damage to headstones at Missouri's Chesed Shel Emeth Society cemetery.

The vandalism report came on a day the White House denounced a spate of recent bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers across the country, including 11 threats reported Monday.

"A lot of people are coming out (to the cemetery) -- they're just interested to see, 'Was their loved one's monument affected by this?' " Phillip Weiss, owner of a monument company helping the cemetery lift the downed stones, told CNN affiliate KTVI on Tuesday morning.

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Police didn't release further details about when the vandalism happened at the cemetery, a burial ground since the late 1800s. But they said officers first responded to a report about the damage about 8:30 a.m. Monday.

Officials at the fenced and gated cemetery believe it happened over the weekend; it was closed between late Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.

Police said they didn't immediately know who did it, or why. Investigators are reviewing security camera footage in the areas surrounding the cemetery but would not say if they considered the vandalism to be a hate crime, according to KTVI.

The vandalism left families wondering whether their loved ones' tombstones were affected, what it will take to repair the damage and whether their heritage had anything to do with why it happened.

TV host: 'Extremely personal for me'

The vandalism drew dismay from people whose relatives are buried there, including Bravo's Andy Cohen, host of "Watch What Happens Live" and executive producer of The Real Housewives franchise.

Cohen devoted a few moments of Monday night's "Watch What Happens" show to the incident, calling the vandal or vandals the "Jackhole of the Day."

"This is extremely personal for me because my great grandparents and many other of my relatives are buried there in that cemetery," said Cohen, a St. Louis-area native. "I don't have to have a personal connection, though, to know that this is not who we are as Americans, and this certainly should not be where we are heading."

He didn't say whether his relatives' headstones were damaged. On Facebook, the cemetery said it aimed to publish the names of the interred whose headstones were damaged by Wednesday morning.

News Courtesy: www.cnn.com