A mural by a local street artist with the Instagram handle trueheartart. Image by Instagram

By Ari Feldman December 19, 2019

A Jersey City artist has painted a mural over the damaged facade of the kosher grocery store where three people were killed by armed assailants last week.

The mural was put up Thursday morning, after the seven day shiva mourning periods for the Jewish victims of the attack had ended. Titled “Bridging Worlds,” the mural depicts the Pulaski Skyway, a bridge connecting Jersey City and Newark, as well as a heart and three blue roses for the three victims inside the store. (A fourth victim, Detective Joseph Seals, was killed when he approached the assailants in a cemetery nearby, before the shooting.)

“One of the things that struck me most was the amount of children’s [sic] in the neighborhood,” the artist, whose name does not appear on social media, wrote in an Instagram post. “There was a school next door and a school across the street. With the amount of shooting that took place that day this could’ve been a whooooole lot worse. (Thank God it wasn’t.)”

The artist painted the mural on a particularly cold morning, they wrote, which could have made their materials more difficult to work with. But, they noted, the sun came out just in time to help warm up the particle board covering the grocery’s destroyed outer wall.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at feldman@forward.com or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

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