A swastika was spray painted onto the garage of a Jewish family in Sandwich, Massachusetts, a town located on Cape Code.
According to the Sandwich Police Department, the anti-Semitic graffiti, which also included a racial slur, was discovered on August 21 by Janet Geist Moore, who is Jewish, after her family arrived home. Police said it could have been done by someone who knew them, possibly due to a dispute. They stated they were not certain it was hate motivated.
However, Jewish residents of the Cape Code town disputed the idea that the incident could be downplayed as “just some ignorant kids.”
Jewish resident Jonathan Finn told The Sandwich Enterprise that “it doesn’t matter if it’s a 10-year-old or an adult, it has to be taken at face value for the hate that it represents.”
Moore, said that discovering the swastika reminded her of why her grandmother and sister left Europe to escape persecution in the early 1900s.
She suspected that the hate graffiti was the work of kids.
“Teach your children to embrace differences, is all I can say,” she told the Enterprise.
The town has experienced swastika vandalism in the past.
In 2019, the parking lot of Sandwich High School was defaced with the Nazi symbol. The school committee wrote off the incident as isolated and insisted it was not done with anti-Semitic intent.
“I was really surprised by the lack of reaction. The response from the town was pretty slow, but the police put it out there quickly, which is great, because that’s what needs to be done,” said Finn.