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Staten Island JCC Receives Bomb Threat, Defaced With Swastika

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By Daniel J. Solomon January 11, 2017

New York’s hate crime wave made land on Staten Island Wednesday, after a swastika and bomb threat was found at a Jewish Community Center in the borough.

Officials at the center, located in a park filled stretch of Staten Island, reported the incident on Wednesday morning to the New York City police department, which discovered no bomb on the site. Authorities are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Since the victory of President-elect Donald Trump, the city and the country have seen a marked rise in bias incidents, many of them targeting Jews with slurs and Holocaust imagery, often graffitied on public areas with Jewish and non-Jewish associations. Targets have included a Williamsburg apartment building, a subway car, numerous city parks and several buildings on the Upper West Side.

On January 9, 16 JCCs across the country received bomb threats.

As of press time, a call for comment to the Staten Island JCC had not been returned.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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