PARIS — Teenage vandals are suspected of overturning as many as 250 gravestones in a cemetery in a rural part of eastern France near the German border, where many Jews once lived but have long since left.

The desecration, which was carried out Thursday but not discovered until Sunday, was perceived by the Jewish community in France as another reminder of the increasingly anti-Semitic mood in the country.

However, according to the local prosecutor, Philippe Vannier, who announced Monday that the police had detained five youths, ages 15 to 17, after one of them confessed, it was not clear if the cemetery was targeted because it was Jewish, or rather because it was thought to be abandoned.

Nonetheless, coming after deadly shootings in Copenhagen over the weekend in which one of the victims was a Jewish man guarding a synagogue, as well as the attacks in early January in and around Paris, including one at a kosher supermarket where four hostages were killed, the cemetery desecration added to a sense that European Jews, and specifically French Jews, are under attack.