Desecration defied

A ceremony has taken place at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France where 37 gravestones and a monument to Holocaust victims were sprayed with anti-semitic graffiti. Christophe Castaner, the interior minister, attended yesterday’s event at Herrlisheim cemetery, near Strasbourg. The desecration was discovered on Tuesday, before an attacker killed four people in the city. The French government sounded the alarm last month over a sharp rise in antisemitic acts in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population.