Interfaith support rises along with attacks

When Adam Zeff, rabbi of the Germantown Jewish Centre in Philadelphia, a short distance from Mount Carmel Cemetery, heard that vandals had desecrated the place where several families in his congregation had loved ones buried, he felt compelled to go see.

“These gravestones weigh hundreds of pounds, and some were even reinforced with iron bars connecting them to their bases,” he wrote in a commentary. “Bringing them down to the ground required great force and determination.”

Zeff was not the only one who went that day to Mount Carmel, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia.