Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

U. of Illinois Menorah Vandalized — for Third Time

A menorah outside the Chabad house at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was vandalized for the third time in 10 months.

The vandalism took place early Sunday morning outside the Chabad Center for Jewish Life, a surveillance video released by the University of Illinois Police Department shows, the Daily Illini student newspaper reported.

The video showed a man and a woman breaking an arm off the 9-foot menorah. The woman has been arrested, according to a Facebook post Monday night by Illini Chabad director Rabbi Dovid Tiechtel.

“Thank you all to the tremendous outpouring of love and concern. It’s heartwarming to see the strength of our entire community,” Tiechtel wrote in the post. “We must commit to not allow these things to happen on campus or anywhere, no matter in what state of mind, your actions count and matter.”

The menorah was repaired and rededicated in December following the previous two incidents of vandalism.

In August, a 20-year-old resident of Champaign, Illinois, where the university is located, was arrested for snapping the menorah off at its base. Max Kristy was not a student at the university and told the local newspaper the News-Gazette that he was drunk at the time of the incident and planned to take the menorah as a gift to a Jewish friend. He was not charged with a hate crime.

The menorah was similarly vandalized in April.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.