Over a dozen graves vandalized at Baltimore Jewish cemetery

Over a dozen gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in Baltimore have been vandalized, local officials say.

“As the son of Holocaust victims and survivors, this symbol hits hard,” Baltimore County Councilman Izzy Patoka writes on Twitter.

Baltimore City Councilman Zeke Cohen tweets: “This too is America. The place for which my great grandmother fled the gas chambers in Austria.”

Pictures from the cemetery show a swastika spray-painted on a grave and the world “holdomir” painted on another, in an apparent misspelling of the Holodomor, a man-made famine in which millions of Ukrainians died, an event believed to have been perpetrated by the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1933.

This weekend, someone spray-painted swastikas on more than a dozen gravestones at the German Hill Road Jewish Cemeteries in Dundalk.

As the son of Holocaust victims and survivors, this symbol hits hard. pic.twitter.com/PyMsnMaLpF

— Izzy Patoka (@CouncilmanIzzy) July 7, 2021