The recent wave of hate continues. Long Island has hosted a hateful trend in the past few weeks, symbols of racism for everyone to see.
It’s the second time it has happened here in the last six years. Overnight, someone painted two swastikas at Young Israel of Hillcrest, Queens. One on the bulletin board in front and the other on the passenger side window of an Hatzolah ambulance.
“Emotionally, it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me angry,” said worshipper, Michael Zabusky.
This orthodox congregation is of some 500 families, including Holocaust survivors. One of them is 84-year-old Josif Roth, who spent World War II in a Nazi labor camp in Hungary.
“It’s a bad memory. Very bad memory when I see this,” he said.
Over the last couple months, there have been a half-dozen such hate symbols throughout the region, scrawled on schools, buses and synagogues. Rory Lancman, a New York Assembly Democrat, suspects they are not necessarily connected.
“If there are dots to be connected, the police and other agencies will act. Right now, we don’t know,” said Lancman.
The synagogue’s Rabbi, Richard Weiss, believes the continuing hate symbols are not so much anti-Semitism, as disrespect for others’ values: values of respecting other people’s individuality, people’s religions and people’s general beliefs.
