Swastika Painted On Jewish Teen’s Car In Boca Raton
(JTA) — A large swastika was spray painted on the side of a car in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Boca Raton, Florida.
The incident occurred early Sunday morning, according to local report. The white swastika took up the entire driver’s-side door of the black Ford Mustang.
The owner of the car is a teenager who is currently visiting Israel, the Miami Herald reported. It is not know if the teen’s visit to Israel made him the intended target.
“This is a direct hate message,” Yona Lunger, an activist in South Florida’s Jewish community, told the Miami Herald. “We are shocked, devastated.”
Many Holocaust survivors live in the neighborhood, residents told local media.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office has launched an investigation into the incident. Residents have asked the local police for increased patrols and some plan to install surveillance cameras, according to reports.
The swastika comes on the heels of several bomb threats on Jewish community centers in South Florida, part of a wave of bomb threats on such centers across the country.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO