Europe Running Out Of Jewish Tombstones To Deface

Tatabanya, Hungary, March 18 – Antisemitic vandals spray-painted swastikas and slogans all over the Jewish cemetery here last week, stoking worries among Europe’s far-right leadership that they face a looming shortage of such sites to deface.

The desecration highlights the need to produce more Jewish graves as soon as possible, and maintain a steady supply, according to Gábor Vona, leader of Hungary’s ultranationalist Jobbik party. “A favorite Hungarian pastime – and, I would say, one that has become popular all over the continent – is the desecration of Jewish graves. This crucial component of our culture is threatened by dwindling numbers of such tombs that remain unvandalized. The only solution is to provide more Jewish tombs, which unfortunately Europe has not been very good at doing in large numbers in recent decades.” He promised that his party, which currently sits in the parliamentary opposition, would do all it can to ensure more Jewish graves.

But even if more such crucial venues for antisemitic graffiti are produced in large numbers, some experts nevertheless anticipate that no long-term solution is at hand that will ensure a supply of desecration-worthy Jewish graves into the next few decades. “The Jewish population of Europe is declining,” notes Austrian demographic expert Jörg Haider. “That’s certainly a positive development, but one of its consequences is that over the next forty or fifty years, precious few new Jewish graves will be produced, and Europe will be deprived of an important component of its cultural heritage.”

He added that although by far the preferred methods for disposing of dead European Jews over the last century have been cremation and mass graves, those methods have the unfortunate side-effect of depriving European youths of large numbers of individual tombstones to spray-paint, smash, topple, or otherwise damage, and that the relatively small number of Jews remaining in Europe necessitates individual graves. Although European Jews number more than one million, many are expected to emigrate elsewhere or assimilate entirely into the host culture over the next few decades, a further threat to the long-term availability of Jewish cemetery plots to defile.

Haider and Vona agree that working to increase, or even maintain steady levels of, the European Jewish population is out of the question. “The only good Jew is a dead Jew,” said Vona, conceding that principle’s inherent contradiction with the need to provide a steady number of Jewish graves for future generations to desecrate. “The prudent course of action, then, involves a measured regulation of the vandalism so that a supply remains available at least into the 2050’s,” he offered, noting that some areas will obviously be forced to ration out the desecrations in keeping with the limited number of as-yet-unvandalized sites.

Haider said he had been in contact with Palestinian and Jordanian representatives, as the latter had experience as recently as 1948-1967 in obtaining large numbers of Jewish graves to desecrate.