“Free Palestine” graffiti at the Baba Sale Congregation in Los Angeles. Image by ADL Los Angeles/Twitter

By Aiden Pink September 12, 2019

A synagogue in Los Angeles was vandalized with graffiti stating “Free Palestine” on Tuesday morning, September 11.

Security footage showed a hooded man spray-painting the wall of the Baba Sale Congregation before driving away, the Jewish Journal reported.

“We’re a Jewish house of worship that’s located 7,500 miles from the Middle East where this conflict is taking place, and we came under attack solely for being Jewish,” synagogue board member Zev Opos told the Journal.

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Opos said there had been “small graffiti incidents in the past” but nothing on this scale. He said the synagogue’s security measures would be increased further.

Baba Sale is a Moroccan-Jewish congregation, and Opos said the incident was painful for congregants whose ancestors were expelled from Muslim countries in the Middle East after the establishment of Israel in 1948.

“When I see the Moroccan Jewish synagogue in my neighborhood grotesquely vandalized with ‘Free Palestine,’ it’s a harsh reminder that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have the same roots,” the American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles regional director, Richard S. Hirschaut, said in a statement. “This is part of a disturbing and unacceptable trend of anti-Semitic crimes in Los Angeles that we must confront.”

Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink

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