Once again, a Jewish cemetery has been vandalized in the United States — this one in Rochester, New York — but the head of the nonprofit corporation that overseas the property is loathe to “label it a hate crime.”
Five headstones were toppled this week at Waad Hakolel Cemetery, also known as Stone Road Cemetery.
Michael Phillips, president of the Britton Road Association, told the Democrat & Chronicle news site, “I don’t want to label it a hate crime. I don’t think there’s any proof of that. I don’t want to label it anti-Semitism. I don’t think there’s any proof of that.”
Phillips doesn’t believe this vandalism has no relation to the other attacks on Jewish cemeteries in the past two weeks because in Philadelphia and Missouri, headstones were damaged, sprayed with paint, he said.
At the northern Rochester cemetery managed by Britton Road Association, Pillips maintained, “there was no defacing” on knocked-over headstones.