On Monday, more than a hundred and fifty gravestones were found damaged or toppled at a historic Jewish cemetery near St. Louis. As soon as she heard the news, Karen Aroesty drove to the cemetery. Many people she knew are buried there. Though she has seen numerous instances of vandalism in her seventeen years at the Missouri/Southern Illinois office of the Anti-Defamation League, which she now directs, this one was especially painful. “I was surprised at how I felt,” Aroesty told me on Tuesday. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. The sadness that I felt was startling.” Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, built more than a century ago, in the St. Louis suburb of University City, had always given her a feeling of calm.
The desecration came just days after President Trump, at a bizarre and at times counterfactual press conference in Washington, dodged a question about recent instances of anti-Semitism. It was asked by Jake Turx, a journalist for an Orthodox Jewish magazine. “I’m the least anti-Semitic person you ever met,” the President declared. In the past month, dozens of Jewish Community Center locations have been evacuated due to anonymous bomb threats. On Wednesday morning, the Anti-Defamation League also received a bomb threat at its New York headquarters.
“The bomb threats have a rhythm all their own,” Aroesty told me. On January 18th, more than twenty J.C.C.s in the U.S. received bomb threats, including the branch in Creve Coeur, closest to Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery. (Since then, many more have received threats, most recently on Monday.) Local police responded to the Creve Coeur threat by clearing the area and bringing in K-9 units to investigate. But even after police officers deem a location safe, Aroesty said, “it leaves the community feeling that tension and instability for a while.” I asked Benjamin Granda, a spokesperson for the St. Louis County Police Department, if he had ever heard of a bomb threat in the area before this month. “This is the first one that I can recall,” he said.
Granda did not suggest a link between the threatening call to the local J.C.C. and the cemetery desecration last weekend. “Anybody from anywhere can place a phone call,” he said, noting that online phone services can make callers difficult to trace. Whoever made the threats on Monday used voice-masking software during the calls. “I don’t think it’s connected specifically,” Aroesty said of the cemetery desecration. But, she added, many members of the Jewish community now perceive a wider threat to their security. “It feels like there’s a piling-on.”
In my own family, the news from St. Louis brought back old memories. My father grew up in Creve Coeur, and attended college a few miles from the vandalized cemetery. In the seventies, he learned to swim at the Creve Coeur J.C.C.; a few decades later, while visiting my grandparents during school vacations, so did I. “I lived a mile from the Jewish Community Center, and I never heard of anybody doing any bad stuff there,” he told me. He now lives in California, and was surprised to learn about the recent anti-Semitic acts. “I’ve always felt that acts of violence, terrorism, whatever—they’re always the tip of an iceberg of discontent,” he said. “Because for every person that’s willing to go and turn over tombstones in a Jewish cemetery, there’s probably thousands of people that don’t like Jews.” At the same time, he didn’t want to read too much into these incidents. “Most people are not calling in bomb threats against Jews,” he said. “Most people don’t hate Jews. So let’s be wary, let’s try to apprehend those who are responsible. But let’s not let them divide us as a country, as a people, any more than we are already divided.”
On Tuesday, President Trump, after receiving criticism from many Jewish leaders for failing to aggressively condemn anti-Jewish sentiment in the U.S., spoke to the NBC News reporter Craig Melvin. “I think it’s horrible,” the President said. “Whether it’s anti-Semitism or racism or any—anything you want to think about having to do with the divide. Anti-Semitism is, likewise, it’s just terrible.” Some Jewish organizations have reacted positively. “The President took an important first step today,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview on PBS. But most reactions were skeptical. The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect called Trump’s remarks “a Band-Aid on the cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected his Administration.” “In all honesty, I’d like to see more,” Aroesty told me.
The Chesed Shel Emeth Society, which oversees the cemetery, spent Tuesday recording the names on each damaged headstone; University City police launched an investigation and are trying to identify the culprits using security-camera footage. While the investigation proceeds, Aroesty said that she can’t describe the damage at the cemetery as an act of hate. Perhaps the culprit did not know it was a Jewish site, or did not target it for that specific reason, she explained. “There are a lot of folks in this community who, frankly, are challenging me to say, ‘Yes, it is, in fact, a hate crime,’ ” she said. “Which I cannot do, under Missouri law, until I know what the motivating factors were.” Jewish leaders have, in the meantime, emphasized the wider problem of anti-Jewish sentiment, and the resilience of Jewish communities. “We’re trying to be a voice of reason and calm,” Rabbi Jim Bennett, who oversees the St. Louis Rabbinical Association, which represents a range of Jewish denominations, said.
Bennett leads Congregation Shaare Emeth, in Creve Coeur, and he said that, in the days since the cemetery was vandalized, he has been moved by offers of support from local politicians and Muslim leaders, among many others. On Tuesday, CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for J.C.C. bomb threats. Meanwhile, a crowd-funding campaign organized by Muslim nonprofits has raised more than seventy-five thousand dollars for cemetery repairs.
Bennett believes that it is possible to emphasize the specific nature of anti-Jewish acts while also framing such acts as part of a wider threat to religious freedom and minority rights. When he checked his e-mail on Tuesday, his inbox was filled with messages of sympathy. The first one he saw was from Reverend Joseph A. Weber, who presides over St. Monica Catholic Church, situated one mile from the Shaare Emeth synagogue, on the same street as the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery.
Two months ago, Weber told me, an arsonist set fire to his church’s Nativity scene; the blaze destroyed the altar and pulpit, leaving the sanctuary unusable. Weber remembers not wanting to cancel services, and thinking, “I want people to know that we are still open for business.” The day after the fire, Weber received a letter from Rabbi Bennett, on behalf of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association. “We stand ready to assist you in any way that we can,” the letter said. “As fellow clergy, we offer our sincere sympathies.” Bennett invited the Catholic congregation to meet at his synagogue, if necessary. Weber ultimately held services in the church gymnasium; local police did not classify the fire as a hate crime.
In his e-mail to Rabbi Bennett on Tuesday, Reverend Weber expressed his dismay at the “horrible desecration of the Jewish cemetery.” “This morning at Mass,” he added, “I mentioned how understanding and helpful the Jewish community was after the fire.” Weber asked his congregation to pray for the respect of all people. Rabbi Bennett took heart from the note. “When we watch people suffer and feel pain,” he told me, “the greatest sign of love and unity is when we feel that pain ourselves.”
