A memorial garden in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, dedicated to two victims of horrific antisemitic murders in Paris in 2017 and 2018, was vandalized with a swastika, JNS reported Sunday.
Jacques Martin, the mayor of Nogent-sur-Marne, condemned the act, calling it “vandalism” and emphasizing that “hatred has no place in Nogent”, according to the report.
The municipality promptly removed the offensive symbol and provided CCTV footage from the area in order to aid investigators.
The garden, which was inaugurated in November 2022, is dedicated to Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll.
Halimi, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties, died in 2017 after being pushed out of her window of her Paris flat by a man who was shouting "Allahu Akbar" during the act.
The murderer, Kobili Traoré, confessed to the killing but a subsequent psychiatric evaluation determined that he was not responsible for his actions.
In April 2021, the French Supreme Court ruled that Halimi’s killer was not criminally responsible for his actions. Following that ruling, 25,000 people gathered across France, responding to calls from citizen groups and Jewish community representatives, to protest the absence of a trial for the murder.
Knoll, who had fled Paris in 1942 to escape the Vel d’Hiv roundup, was stabbed 11 times and her body set on fire.
In 2021, her two killers were convicted: One was acquitted of murder but sentenced to 15 years in prison for theft, while the other was sentenced to life in prison with a 22-year minimum term for murder, with the aggravating factor being that the victim was Jewish.
The mayor said on Sunday that, until now, Nogent-sur-Marne had been spared from the wave of antisemitism that has been spreading across the country in recent months, said JNS.
Determined to prevent such hatred from taking hold in his city, he vowed that ignorance and hatred would not be tolerated. He reaffirmed the town’s commitment to preserving the memory of Halimi and Knoll, stating that they would not be “murdered a second time.”