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Copycat vandalism?

Copycat vandalism?

Last updated on: June 29, 2017 at 9:05 pm by Jane the Actuary

Copycat vandalism? 2017-06-29T21:05:35-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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After the vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in an inner-ring St. Louis suburb last weekend, we’ve got another instance, this time in a north Philadelphia Jewish cemetery, Mt. Carmel, in the neighborhood of Wissinoming, in which over 500 headstones have been knocked down or damaged.

I wrote about the racial divides in University City earlier, and the fact that the city is a historically Jewish area, but now is divided, with the cemetery in the black part of town — so I went back to the same census data. The neighborhood, turns out, is also the name of a defined census neighborhood. The racial mix: 57% white, 18% Hispanic, 19% black, the remainder Asian, mixed, or other; this masks more variation by tract; one tract that appears to be very close to the cemetery is 60% black, the adjoining tract is only 17% black. For comparison, Philadelphia as a whole is 37% white, 43% black.

What about income levels? The median income in Philadelphia is 37,000. For blacks, it’s 30,000; for whites, 50,000. The median income in the Wissinoming neighborhood is slightly higher than the median for the city (though this is lower than the state median of about 50K). In the neighborhood just south it’s 29K.

Crime rates? Here’s the city website – there are a good number of thefts in the immediate vicinity (Frankford Avenue just south of Robbins Avenue, between the highway and the river).

I will also have to say that it looks like a fairly run-down part of town — not burnt-out and vacant as you’d see in Detroit but very definitely working class, to put it nicely, based on a Google Maps tour.

And the area has 4 cemeteries, all more or less next to each other — and as this Philly.com article notes, only the Jewish cemetery was vandalized.

One other possibly relevant item is that there appears to be no active Jewish community in the surrounding area, as was the case for University City. The cemetery also appears not to be an active cemetery; according to Find a Grave,

This cemetery’s management was assumed by Har Nebo Cemetery and Monuments a few years ago. Har Nebo is located at 6061 Oxford Ave, Philadelphia PA 19149. This is several blocks NW of the Mount Carmel Cemetery. Mount Carmel has no on-site office. Har Nebo has at least some of the old, hand-written ledger books for Mount Carmel at their office. In an August 2016 conversation, the owner said they would have to charge a fee to search for anything. They are not staffed for genealogy support, as they are primarily a monument sales and funeral management organization. Har Nebo owner is not aware of any overall map of the Mount Carmel property. Possibly they would be willing to let family members search records in their office, but we did not discuss that. He said several local Eagle Scouts have done projects in Mount Carmel, but we did not discuss the details or availability of their results.

And, speaking of Google Maps, it is an older cemetery, and there’s clearly been some settling of the ground, and, either due to this shifting or due to prior vandalism, knocked-over headstones seem not to be a rare occurance. Here are two screen grabs from Google Maps Street View, dated September 2016:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.02363,-75.0712349,3a,37.5y,45.35h,67.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slkBoHRr2uiHbKMLFNKm-Bg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

and

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.02363,-75.0712349,3a,37.5y,45.35h,67.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slkBoHRr2uiHbKMLFNKm-Bg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

(I’ve asked the Patheos expert for guidance on whether these streetview images are copyrighted, or can be inserted directly into the post, but in the meantime, please do follow the links for examples of knocked-over headstones.)

On the whole, the cemetery seems a lot more jumbled than the secular Cedar Hill Cemetery across the street. I don’t know if there was something different in the burial practices of those buried at these two cemeteries — say, perhaps, that Jewish burials don’t (or didn’t, at the time of these burials) use cement vaults, producing more settlement, and more unstable gravestones that were toppled over naturally or were easier for vandals to topple over than those at the other cemetery. Perhaps the older sections of the secular cemeteries just aren’t visible from Street View in the same way.

What’s more, a commenter at the original news report says,

I drive by that cemetery almost every day, and for over a month, there have been more and more grave stones pushed over/broken.

Perhaps, too, the fact that most of the graves are quite old meant that there are few visitors, so that an ongoing vandalism was not reported until well after it had begun. And once the cemetery was already in poor condition, the hurdle to vandalize it further is lowered.

Another commenter says,

I don’t think (I really hope not at least) this was an act of anti-Semitic vandalism. I grew up right in that area and for years, there has always been people cutting through the cemeteries there or hanging out, drinking, or doing drugs there. I can tell you I have seen acts of vandalism at those cemeteries before whether knocking down the stones, graffiti, and leaving trash (beer cans, weed bags, or needles).

And a third,

Wissinoming park is a large park directly across the street from the cemetery where lots of kids spend the weekend nights drinking. Entirely possible.

Which could also explain why Mount Carmel, not the others, would be the target.

So there’s no particularly obvious answer here one way or the other. Would a group of anti-semites have gotten tired of just tweeting with ((())) around people’s names, and have been inspired by the vandalism in St. Louis (“hey, I never thought of tipping over headstones before! Apparently it’s not that hard . . .”) to find a Jewish cemetery nearby? And would Mt. Carmel Cemetery (small, and unlikely to have shown up on a google search before the vandalism propelled it into the news) have been what outsiders would have stumbled on? Or would it have been local troublemakers, and, if so, would Mt. Carmel have been the target because of its Jewishness or because it was easier pickings? And if the former, would it have been an expressly anti-Jewish sentiment (“the Jews are nefarious globalists who control the world economy”) or something more local (“Mr. Goldstein who cheated me at the pawn shop”) or were the vandals up to no good in the first place, and chose the Jewish cemetery as the target because of the Hebrew writing, or because it wasn’t considered a “community cemetery”? Besides which, would the same group have gone back, night after night?

And, of course, as an old cemetery, only marginally maintained, with just a chain link fence, the chances of finding the culprits seem fairly slim.

I’ll close with this: anti-semitism has always seemed to me to be just about the stupidest sort of prejudice out there, especially in the year 2017. Anti-black prejudice? Sure, I can get that you look at the crime rates in the inner cities, or at the gangs, or at the rap culture which seems to celebrate gangs, and generalize this to “all blacks are thugs.” Anti-Muslim prejudice? Yes, of course, Muslims attacked us, claiming that they were doing it in the name of Islam. Prejudice against Mexican immigrants? Again, Spanish translations everywhere you look, gangbangers in the news, “anchor babies” and marchers for amnesty with signs in Spanish. I’m not saying the prejudice is right. I’m just saying that there’s a certain logic to it.

But anti-semitism? That’s just stupid. The idea that a group which has been discriminated against throughout history somehow secretly is pulling the strings on the entire global financial world? How dumb do you have to be, to believe that? How divorced from reality, to deny the mountain of evidence about the Holocaust, or to imagine that a people who collectively couldn’t save 6 million of their co-religionists, still pull all the strings? Yes, I know this exists, but these people are idiots.

Which, I suppose, means that it makes far more sense to me for this to be a matter of vandals for whom anti-semitism was, at most, a contributing factor, than to believe that some roaming group of anti-semites, emboldened by Trump’s victory, staged a mass desecration of graves to intentionally target Jews.

Note: the “featured image” is from Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_toppled_stones_(2981745429)_(2).jpg (location not identified) – and is not from the cemetery in question.

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