Photo: 27east
The community around Montauk, New York, woke up Monday morning to a rash of swastikas and antisemitic messages spray painted across parts of the small beach town. According to reports, the Nazi symbols and antisemitic messages were sprayed on doors and windows at places like Naturally Good, a health food store on Main Street, spreading out to the food trucks and bathrooms sitting outside of Ditch Plains Beach, a popular surf spot in the area slightly west of the famous Montauk Point Lighthouse.
The vandals also sprayed “Free Palestine,” and “Jeden Die” on some walls. It’s assumed the latter was a spelling error, meant to be the German word for “Jews,” which is correctly spelled “Juden.”
“The spelling is not great,” East Hampton Town Police Captain Chris Anderson told Newsday, saying that even “Free Palestine” was difficult to make out.
The vandalism comes as the Anti-Defamation League reported a 400 percent increase in antisemitic acts ranging from threats to vandalism and more (compared to the same two-week period in 2022) in the two weeks following Hamas’ October 7 attack leaving 1,400 people murdered, including women and children, and the abduction of more than 200 hostages.
Israel has since launched an aggressive campaign against Hamas in Gaza that has resulted in the death of nearly 8,800 people, according to the Gazan health ministry.
“There is this conflation of whatever Israel does with antisemitism — whatever Israel does, Jews are responsible everywhere — and it creates a very scary environment for Jews in America,” said Rabbi Josh Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. “The life of Jews right now is feeling you are in jeopardy — it feels like Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish businesses were smashed in Germany in 1938. I know this is a marginal part of the local community but it’s scary.”
According to a report by The New York Times, federal officials have seen a dramatic increase “in threats against Jewish, Muslim, and Arab American communities and institutions across our country.”
In the same report, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Jews represent less than three percent of the American population, but even before Oct. 7 they were the target of about 60 percent of the religious-based hate crimes, citing statistics from 2022.
In response, members of the small Long Island town — one with a tight-knit surf community — organized a “Love Rally” to speak out against the vandalism and its messages.
