Santa Monica Chabad Center Is Vandalized
SANTA MONICA, California (JTA) – Police are investigating a vandalism attack on a Chabad center in Santa Monica.
Unknown persons smeared feces and rice on the window of the Living Torah Center on Wilshire Blvd., either late Saturday night or early Sunday, the first day of Hanukkah.
Rabbi Boruch Rabinowitz discovered the defacement when he opened the center at about 8 a.m. Sunday, according to media reports.
A large Hanukkah menorah stands behind the Center’s glass-walled street front.
“This seems kind of intentional,” the center’s assistant rabbi, Dovid Tenenbaum, told the Los Angeles Times. “With a religious artifact in the window, we have to assume so.”
The Living Torah Center posted a message on its website thanking the public for “the outpouring of love and support from people of every background.” It said that “in the spirit of the holiday” the Center would “move forward and continue to spread light and love and not let this incident diminish our resolve to bring goodness to the world.”
According to the Times, it was not the first episode of apparent anti-Semitism at the Center. It reported that the Center had received a threatening letter about a year ago, and graffiti was found scrawled on the Center’s sukkah. The Times quoted Tenenbaum as saying that during services about a month ago “a man stood up and shouted ‘Heil, Hitler,’ positioning his arms as if shooting a rifle. He ran away before anyone could catch him.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
