Jewish Cemetery Desecrated in Barcelona, More Than 20 Graves Vandalized

Vandals on Sunday targeted the Jewish cemetery in Barcelona, desecrating more than 20 graves and smashing tombstones.

The crime comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment across Spain, whose Jewish community has expressed alarm over the increasingly hostile environment.

“We have seen how, at demonstrations, online and on the street, hate speech against Jews became routine. Then signs appeared across the city. Later, posters were hung on public buildings with slogans,” the Jewish Community of Barcelona said in a statement. “After that, a map was published marking Jewish targets, including a school. And now, the desecration of graves. This is not random. This is an escalation. From slogans to marking. From marking to threats. And from threats to action.”

The statement referred to an online platform mapping Jewish-owned businesses, schools, and Israeli-linked companies in Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain.

A spokesperson for the Catalan police told Agence France Presse that “we are aware of the [cemetery] incident and have opened an investigation,”

The European Jewish Congress (EJC) condemned the vandalism on X.

“What we are seeing is not isolated. It is part of a wider escalation that begins with words, continues with targeting and intimidation and ends in acts like this,” the EJC said. “When hate is normalized in public discourse, the step to physical action becomes smaller.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry also released a statement with photos of the crime, saying, “We condemn the vandalism of the Jewish cemetery in Barcelona. This despicable act is a result of the anti-Israel campaign by the Sánchez government. We stand with Spain’s Jewish community. Antisemitism must never be normalized and must be firmly rejected in all societies.”

In September, Lorenzo Rodríguez, mayor of Castrillo Mota de Judíos in northern Spain, warned that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had fueled antisemitic sentiment.

“The government is fostering antisemitism that will prove deeply damaging for Spain,” Rodríguez said. “Sánchez’s moves are less about serious foreign policy and more about deflecting attention from his trials and failures in governance.”

Rodríguez described his view that Spain “isn’t leading anything — it’s merely whitewashing Hamas and other terrorist groups.”

Sánchez had told members of his Socialist Workers’ Party that month that Israel should not be allowed to participate in international sports and that the Jewish state “cannot continue to use any international platform to whitewash its image.”

Spain’s Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun has expressed similar calls for boycotting Israel, saying, “We have to make sure that Israel does not take part in the next Eurovision,” referring to the international song contest.

Madrid has been one of the West’s fiercest critics of Israel’s defensive military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

“What [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu presented in October 2023 as a military operation in response to the horrific terrorist attacks has ended up becoming a new wave of illegal occupations and an unjustifiable attack against the Palestinian civilian population – an attack that the UN special rapporteur and the majority of experts already describe as a genocide,” Sánchez said in a televised speech last year.

The diplomatic tension between the two nations reached a boiling point in September, when Madrid recalled its ambassador.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) describes Barcelona as notable for its anti-Israel sentiment, characterizing its position as an “outlier status.”

The AJC wrote in May 2023 that in February of that year, “Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau announced that Spain’s second-largest city would sever ties with its twin city Tel Aviv. The move answered the demands of anti-Israel activists who in January had petitioned the city council to condemn Israel.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 report names Spain as one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe (ranked 15 out of 18 in the region), with 26 percent of adults — 10.4 million people — expressing belief in six or more bigoted tropes against Jews.

The Spanish Jewish community recently filed complaints over an online platform that targeted Jewish establishments.

First reported by the local Jewish outlet Enfoque Judío, the interactive map — known as Barcelonaz — was launched by an unidentified group claiming to be “journalists, professors, and students” on the French-hosted mapping platform GoGoCarto.

As a publicly accessible and collaboratively created online platform, the map marked over 150 schools, Jewish-owned businesses — including kosher food shops — and Israeli-linked as well as Spanish and international companies operating in Israel, labeling them as “Zionist.”

Jewish leaders in Spain strongly denounced the BarcelonaZ initiative, warning that it fostered further discrimination and hatred against the community amid an increasingly hostile environment in which Jews and Israelis continue to be targeted.