Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images
Police in Oakland, California are investigating after a large public menorah was wrecked—dismantled and thrown into a nearby lake, with antisemitic graffiti scrawled on its cement pedestal—in the early hours of Wednesday, sending shockwaves through the local community.
“I feel afraid,” Rabbi Dovid Labkowski, whose synagogue, the Chabad Center of Oakland, organizes the lighting of the 9-foot-tall Lake Merritt menorah, told the Oaklandside. “It makes me feel angry that this would happen in Oakland, a place with so much diversity. It’s a place we want to live together in peace.”
Labkowski told local station KGO that he’d received a text on Wednesday morning alerting him to the menorah’s destruction. “We found the pieces all over,” he added to the Los Angeles Times. “It just seemed like somebody destroyed it, literally chopped it up into pieces. This is 350 pounds of steel.”