Swastikas and a message “Die, Jew” were written on Beth Israel Center, Madison’s Conservative synagogue, sometime during the weekend of April 25 through 27.
According to Steven Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council, this was the first incident of anti-Semitic vandalism on a Madison synagogue “in at least 10 years.”
It is not clear, however, whether the vandalism happened in separate incidents or at the same time, as different items were discovered and reported at different times, but may have been done by the same person.
On Friday, April 25, someone drew two large swastikas on the center’s front door sometime between the time the door was opened for morning minyan at 6:40 a.m. and the time worshippers began arriving at 7 a.m., Morrison said.
Then on Saturday morning, an arriving worshipper at about 9 a.m. spotted a smaller swastika and the words on a brick facing the building’s southwest corner, according to a report in the May 5 Wisconsin State Journal.
Morrison said the police had inspected the building for other marks on Friday and didn’t see the smaller marks; but “it’s always possible” that they missed them.
What is curious is that both defacements appear to have been made with the same implement, a black marking pen; and both were drawn at eye-level and at the same angle, suggesting that they were drawn by the same person, he said.
In addition, the Madison detective assigned to the case, Alix Olson, a specialist in hate crimes, discovered a report of a possibly related incident nearby earlier in April, Morrison said.
In that incident, an African American person found the letters “KKK” drawn on the entry to the person’s apartment and on the person’s van, also with a black marking pen, Morrison said.
Morrison said the defacement happened a few days before the Madison community’s Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) event, held this year at Beth Israel Center.
“It’s chilling any time I see a swastika anywhere, and more so on a synagogue,” he said.
He also said he has worked with Olson for 20 years “on a variety of hate crime kinds of things,” and “I have a lot of confidence in her.”
Loading ...