Trenton's Jews

A Promise To Keep In A Budapest Graveyard STEVE LIPMAN A section of the overgrown Kozma Street Synagogue before Michael Perl’s cleanup project got going, top. Above, the restored section. Photos courtesy of Michael Perl As a 13-year-old middle school student from Sydney, Australi a, Michael Perl visited Hungary for the first time in 1984 with his Hungarian-born, Holocaust survivor father. They walked around Budapest’s sprawling Kozma Street Jewish cemetery, where Perl’s great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents and “many other relatives” are buried. The grounds, says Perl, who moved to the United States 20 years ago and works as a portfolio manager, were in good shape. “It left a deep impression on me.” Eight years ago, Perl went back to the cemetery again. Most of the 190-acre site was now overgrown with trees and above-ground roots and weeds, and the gravestones were covered with ivy; the area was largely impenetrable. “You could not walk in most of the s...

France, December 13, 2018 Dozens of gravestones and a monument to the holocaust have been desecrated with swastikas and other  antisemitic  signs at a Jewish cemetery near  Strasbourg . The graffiti – which also included “heil Hitler” – was discovered just hours before an Islamist terrorist  shot dead three people  at a Christmas market in the  French  city on Tuesday. The two incidents have not been linked. The vandalism at the Herrlisheim cemetery – in which 37 graves were targeted – is the fourth time in just two months that far-right symbols have appeared in the Alsace region, according to the  Times of Israel . It came shortly after police in France revealed they had registered a 69 per cent rise in the number of antisemitic crimes in the first nine months of 2018 compared with the same period last year. A ceremony has since been held at the cemetery to denounce the vandalism and remember Holocaust victims. https://ww...