The five perpetrators of the desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Sarre-Union in Bas-Rhin (Alsace), in 2015, were sentenced to civil proceedings. Minors at the time of the facts, they will have to pay 85,000 euros in moral damages to around forty civil parties.
In detail, the sums allocated range from 1,250 to 3,000 euros, according to the deliberation on civil interests transmitted by the registry to AFP and rendered Friday by the Saverne juvenile court.
The perpetrators of this desecration, the most serious targeting a Jewish cemetery for twenty years, were between 15 and 17 years old at the time of the events. They had been arrested in February 2015, after one of them had surrendered himself to the gendarmerie.
The five miners ransacked nearly 270 graves. Tombs had also been opened and the defilers had urinated on some graves.
A second conviction for desecration
On September 15, 2017, they had already been criminally sentenced by the juvenile court to suspended sentences of 8 to 18 months in prison and 140 hours of community service for desecration and degradation of graves “due to the affiliation of the deceased persons to a specific religion”.
This new sentence pronounced on Friday, this time in civil court, “sends a strong signal to the perpetrators of an unprecedented anti-Semitic act and who have not to date shown any repentance or shown the slightest remorse”, welcomed in a statement from the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra) of Bas-Rhin, civil party in this case.
“The fight against racism and anti-Semitism requires exemplary justice without weakness, prevention through education in schools, prisons, in business, among the police and especially on social networks. “, continues the Licra, which” will remain vigilant and demanding so that justice contributes to repairing and preventing this deep evil which corrodes our society “.
The desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Sarre-Union had provoked very strong emotion. The President of the Republic at the time, François Hollande, had made the trip for a ceremony of meditation organized in the presence of many political and religious leaders.
At the end of October 2021, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, went to Sarre-Union for a ceremony marking the rehabilitation of the cemetery, after several years of restoration.