A school district in New Jersey has been hit with its sixth incident of anti-Semitic and racist graffiti since November, JTA reported on Thursday.
A swastika was found a week ago in the sixth-floor girls’ bathroom at Lawton C. Johnson Summit Middle School in Summit, a Central Jersey suburb of some 21,000 about 25 miles west of New York City.
The six reported incidents involve swastikas at the middle school and Summit High School.
“We did go one month without, but I’m sad that I have to report this,” Superintendent of Schools June Chang said last week in his monthly remarks at the Summit Board of Education meeting, the TAPinto local news website reported.
The district has been providing ongoing educational programming about hate speech, according to the report.
The Anti-Defamation League in a statement called the incidents “a sad reminder of an observable trend that the ADL has been tracking in New Jersey over the past two quarters.”
Last month, an 11th grader was expelled from a private school in Bergen County, New Jersey, after anti-Semitic and racist graffiti was found in bathrooms on the school campus.
The hate graffiti were first discovered at the Dwight-Englewood Upper School on March 1. It was discovered again days later after a letter about the incident was sent to students, parents and staff of the school, and after an assembly program with the entire student body.
The US has seen an increase in incidents of anti-Semitism in recent years. According to an FBI report published in late 2018, hate crimes against Jews in America rose by more than a third last year and accounted for 58 percent of all religion-based hate crime.