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PRAGUE (JTA) — Vandals destroyed 70 headstones this week at a cemetery in Kosice, in eastern Slovakia.

A memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was also damaged Monday, as were the graves of former rabbis.

The head of the city's Jewish community, Ivan Kolin, said the incident was a clear case of anti-Semitism because the surrounding graves and memorials at the public cemetery were left untouched.

"It's sad that something like this could happen in Kosice, which was known everywhere for the tolerant coexistence of people of all nationalities and religions," he told a Czech news service.

Police are investigating the incident.

A few days earlier, vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery in Novy Zamky, in southwestern Slovakia, damaging more than 160 headstones. One of the headstones was daubed with a swastika.

Rare Torah missing from Russian library

MOSCOW (JTA) — A 12th-century Torah scroll, along with dozens of manuscripts and rare books, has been reported missing from the Russian State Library.

The first inventory of the library's manuscript and rare book collection in nearly 20 years revealed that more than 200 items have disappeared during that period, according to the daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

One library employee said the books and manuscripts must have disappeared years ago and were "sold somewhere abroad."

The Russian State Library, formerly known as the Lenin Library, is where the Schneerson Library has been stored for more than 70 years.

The collection of 12,000 volumes of books and manuscripts collected by five generations of Lubavitcher rebbes was confiscated in the early 1920s by Soviet authorities and transferred to the library.

Zhirinovsky must apologize for slur

MOSCOW (JTA) — A Moscow court has ruled that Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky must apologize for calling a top Russian security official a CIA and Israeli secret service agent.

The Russian lawmaker made the statements more than two years ago during a session of the lower house of the Russian Parliament.

In a November 1994 session, Zhirinovsky had accused Sergey Stepashin, then-director of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, a successor to the KGB, of being an agent for the CIA and Israel's Mossad.