Voronezh, Russia – Anti-Semitic Vandals Sentenced to Prison

Voronezh, Russia – Two young men were sentenced by a court for vandalizing a Jewish cemetery twice over the last 18 months.

Roman Aristov was given a two-year suspended sentence while Andrey Bobkov was sentenced to 25 months in prison for the crime of "mockery of the bodies of the dead and their places of burial motivated by ethnic or religious hatred."

In the fall of 2006 and again last March, the defendants vandalized a Jewish cemetery, defacing some tombstones with swastikas and knocking others down. Russian courts rarely sentence cemetery vandals to actual prison time. [jta]