Members of Maine’s Jewish community say they’re disgusted that someone spray painted swastikas on four headstones in a Portland cemetery.
Emily Chaleff of the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine says the group hopes the people responsible for the vandalism are found and punished.
Chaleff says the cemetery is hallowed ground and the sanctity of that space has been violated by a universal symbol of hate and intolerance, a symbol of particular loathing to the Jewish community.
Almost a year ago a swastika was painted on a message board outside a Portland synagogue.
The Portland Press Herald says the vandalism at the Mount Sinai Cemetery was reported Tuesday

BRITISH diplomats feared wartime Pope Pius XII was not doing enough to speak out against the Holocaust, according to secret documents unearthed by historians. Pius has been a controversial figure in recent weeks after the Vatican announced it had put him on the road to sainthood, despite strong objections from Jewish leaders.
Italian historians unearthed significant documents during research at Britain’s public record office in Kew. In November 1944, the British ambassador to the Holy See, D’Arcy Osborne, wrote a letter to the Foreign Office in London after having a meeting with Pius at the Vatican.

He described how they had discussed the recent massacre of 400,000 Jews in Hungary by the Nazis and he had suggested that perhaps the Pope should “speak out about the mistreatment of Hungarian Jews”. However, the Pope said to him he was “more concerned about the treatment and violence towards the peoples of the Baltic states and Poland at the hands of the Russians.”

Rome, Jan 29 (IANS/AKI) Vandals have defaced the walls of a Rome museum, which celebrates the resistance to Nazi occupation, with graffiti that calls the Holocaust ‘zionist propaganda’.

The site of the Historical Museum of the Liberation was used as a prison by Nazis during the occupation of the city until it was liberated by Allied troops in 1944.

Police have opened an investigation into the possible involvement of extreme right-wing groups who sprayed the anti-Semitic scribble as Pope Benedict XVI and Italian political leaders prepared to mark Holocaust Remembrance day on Wednesday.

Swastikas, Celtic crosses and graffiti denouncing leaders of Rome’s Jewish community, the city’s mayor Alemanno, Israel and the US were also sprayed onto walls of buildings in the area.

The Nazis killed almost all the 1,000 Jews deported from Rome in 1943.

Pope Benedict XVI Wednesday recalled the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, an event which revealed ‘the unprecedented cruelty’ of the Nazi Holocaust.

The 82-year-old pontiff made the remarks in his native German during his weekly general audience.

‘Jan 27, 1945, the gates of the Nazi concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, were opened and the few survivors freed,’ Benedict said.

‘That event, and the testimony of those who survived, revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany,’ added the pope, who as a teenager – like most others at the time – had been a member of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of the war.

Holocaust Remembrance Day which is being marked in several European nations, serves, according to Benedict, to recall ‘the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honour those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity’.

Benedict earlier this month made his first visit as pontiff to Rome’s Jewish main synagogue, an event dogged by a row over his recent elevation towards sainthood of World War II-era pontiff, Pius XII.

Critics say Pius failed to speak out against the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews, but Benedict and other supporter say he acted behind the scenes to ensure that Catholic-run institutions including convents and monasteries sheltered those fleeing from the crimes.

Wednesday, Benedict said the Shoah, or Holocaust, should serve as a universal lesson and ‘arouse ever greater respect for the dignity of each person, so that all mankind may feel itself to be one large family.’

‘May omnipotent God illuminate hearts and minds, that such tragedies never happen again,’ he said.

An exhibition marking Holocaust Memorial Day in a public park in Oxford has been vandalised.

Oxford artist Nicholas Hedges set up hundreds of 2ft-high metal stands at Shotover Park as part of a display.

Each was marked with a label containing extracts from a diary written by a Polish mayor during the early 1940s.

Mr Hedges said many of the stands have been removed. “It’s something you’ve got to, unfortunately, expect to happen,” he added.

The exhibition, called “The Woods, Breathing”, is due to continue along the yellow trail of the park until 8 February.

“There are enough stands left to hopefully remain there for at least the duration of the exhibition,” Mr Hedges said.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

At 1100 GMT, Oxford city and Oxfordshire county councillors gathered to reflect on the Holocaust at Oxford Town Hall, before watching a short film about the atrocities.