Unidentified individuals spray-painted swastikas last week on some 30 headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a local rabbi confirmed on Wednesday.
The incident happened last week before the outbreak of war between Iran and Israel, Rabbi Mendy Axelrod told JNS.
Police are working to identify the perpetrators, who did not damage any of the headstones.
Axelrod, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who has lived in Moldova for more than a decade, said that there had apparently not been an uptick in antisemitic incidents after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and plunged the region into a war that has triggered a surge of hatred against Jews worldwide.
“There have been attempts to mobilize people against Israel, in protest rallies and such, but they have been very limited in scale,” said Axelrod. The atmosphere toward Jews in Moldova has not worsened in his opinion, and the incident at the cemetery is a rare occurrence, he said.
The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimated in 2020 that Moldova has some 1,900 people who identify as Jews.
Neither Moldova, a landlocked nation sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, nor its Jewish community keeps aggregated statistics regarding antisemitic incidents, “mainly because they’re too few to justify this kind of monitoring,” said Axelrod.
