Tarek El-Messidi had been planning to leave Philadelphia to visit family on Sunday night. But when he heard that Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery had been desecrated, he cancelled his flight. El-Messidi is Muslim, but he felt it was important to be with his hometown Jewish community at that moment, he said. “Both communities in America are being targeted right now. There’s a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,” he said. “That could have just as easily been a Muslim cemetery.”
Just one week after a Jewish cemetery in Missouri was vandalized, Philadelphia police reported that roughly 100 headstones have been toppled or damaged in the Mount Carmel cemetery. These are not easy monuments to knock down, El-Messidi said: He saw several toppled stones that were three or four feet wide at the base. El-Messidi and the local rabbis who showed up on Sunday night said their group observed far more extensive damage than police reported, with more than 500 headstones affected throughout the cemetery. It’s not clear when that damage happened, though, or whether it was all intentional.
Like El-Messidi, Philadelphia Jewish leaders have been quick to condemn the vandalism as an act of targeted anti-Semitism. “After you start walking from row to row,” said Shawn Zevit, the lead rabbi at Mishkan Shalom, a local Reconstructionist synagogue, “it quickly moves from a random act of vandalism to something with larger intentions and a systematic approach to things.”