News Brief

A Russian court handed down a harsher than usual sentence to a teenager for vandalizing a Jewish cemetery. Evgeny Alyoshin, 18, was given a 2 1/2-year suspended sentence by a ourt in the northwestern city of Nizhny Novgorod sentenced for his attacks on the Krasnaya Etna cemetery in the city’s Jewish quarter, according to the Russian Web site Sem40.ru. The graves destroyed beyond repair in three attacks in May and June included famous city doctors, teachers, war veterans and the young daughter of a local Jewish community leader. Most anti-Semitic prosecutions in Russia result in a much lighter sentence based on charges of simple hooliganism. Alyoshin received a harsher sentence, even though it was suspended, for “mockery over the bodies of the dead and their burial motivated by ethnic hatred.” According to prosecutors, Alyoshin told his friends that “he didn’t like Jews” and that he was surprised that they kept righting the stones after he knocked them over. Community leader Edward Chaprak said his daughter had died in a car accident with her fiance. Alyoshin knocked over the bust of his daughter several times, damaging it irrevocably, the site reported. “We spent their wedding money on this monument,” Chaprak said. “Each time we had to pick it back up, it was like burying my child again.”