The hideous desecration of the Jewish cemetery in the southern French town of Carpentras remains as much a mystery today as it was a year ago when the deed was done during the night of May 10-11, by parties still unknown.
And Carpentras wants to forget. No one there will talk about it, including the small Jewish community, which still uses the 13th-century burial ground.
On the anniversary, Freddy Haddad, a physician who heads the local Jewish community, did not answer his telephone. The mayor of Carpentras was on vacation. There was no commemoration of the act of racist vandalism that drew shudders of revulsion from people of all faiths around the globe.
Two Jewish women of the town entered the cemetery a day after it was assaulted. They found 34 gravestones overturned.
Two coffins had been exhumed. One was broken open. The corpse it contained of an 84-year-old man buried two weeks earlier had been skewered on the point of a white umbrella.
A large Star of David, ripped off another gravestone, was placed on the corpse’s stomach. A plaque taken from another tombstone engraved with the words “Souvenir from the neighbors,” was put on the genitals.
There were no graffiti, no symbols, no clues to help the police.
A force of 100 detectives sent from Paris to investigate the crime returned empty-handed. Although hundreds of suspects were detained for questioning, no leads were established.
PERPETRATORS NEVER FOUND
Then Interior Minister Pierre Joxe, who is now minister of defense, figured the perpetrators had to be members of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right-wing National Front, a racist party with anti-Semitic tendencies.
On May 14, 1990, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Paris to protest the desecration. In an unprecedented demonstration of solidarity, President Francois Mitterrand joined the marchers.
Jewish militants from Paris’ garment center carried an effigy of Le Pen with a sign saying “Carpentras — It’s Me.”
There followed a period when, in the words of sociologist Paul Yonnet, Le Pen and his National Front were “demonized.”
But the most exhaustive police investigation in years failed to link the extremists with the Carpentras crime. The police turned their attention to satanic cults and other marginal groups, to no avail.
On the first anniversary of Carpentras, no politician wants to talk about it, except Le Pen, who has donned a mantle of injured innocence.
He and a group of supporters went to the Elysee Palace gates to hand the guard an open letter for President Mitterrand.
“You know the truth” about the desecration, Le Pen wrote. “You know that the National Front is innocent. You ought then to publicly atone for the injustice done to its members and voters, all victims of the moral damage inflicted upon them because of you and your government.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
