Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

At the end of April, on the Russian Orthodox Easter, vandals destroyed 52 headstones at the Jewish cemetery.

The desecrated headstones were turned over and broken. Dozens of metal nameplates were ripped off the stones, some of which were daubed with swastikas.

Viktor Vaksman, the head of the Smolensk Jewish community, said at the time that anti-Semitic incidents have become "a sort of Easter tradition" in Smolensk.