Vandals desecrate menorah at SDSU Chabad house
This was the second time that the same Chabad house was vandalized this year.
Nearly $10,000 has been raised in a GoFundMe campaign to repair the damages.
On June 25, two vandals at San Diego State University were caught on camera committing an anti-Semitic attack against the campus Chabad house.
The surveillance footage shows the vandals running with a banner covered in student faces that they had ripped from the house and shaking the house’s menorah so hard that one branch broke completely off.
Rabbi Chalom Boudjnah of the Chabad House at San Diego State University told KUSI news that the incident reminded him of the anti-Semitism he faced throughout his childhood in France. He said he could only watch the video once because “watching the menorah being treated that way was too painful.”
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A GoFundMe has been launched to repair the damages done by the vandals on Friday morning. The campaign has already almost all of its $10,000 goal.
For the Jewish community on the SDSU campus, a hate crime such as this one is not an uncommon occurrence. This is the second time the Chabad house has been targeted in the last few months, and the third anti-Semitic crime on the SDSU campus since March.
On April 15, a break-in was reported, and multiple sentimental items were stolen. The items were returned one month later after one of the burglars was caught bragging on social media about the crime, according to The Jerusalem Post.
In March, a campus building was vandalized with anti-Semitic phrases and other symbols.
The rise in anti-Semitic crimes on the SDSU campus follows the national trend of increasing antisemitism in the United States.
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Over the last few months, social media has been flooded with misinformation and fancy graphics bashing Israel and unconditionally supporting Palestine.
For example, in the week following the initial outbreak of violence this spring between Israel and Hamas, an analysis of twitter returned more than 17,000 tweets with variations of the phrase, “Hitler was right.”
