The sudden appearance of anti-Semitic protestors in San Antonio, Texas has caused residents to speak up.
Over the last week, anti-Semitic abuse been hurled in public and flyers with anti-Jewish slurs have been found in the area. The incidents are being blamed on agitators from out of town, Fox29 reported.
San Antonio resident Stephanie Basile-Drileck discovered one of the anti-Semitic flyers on front of her house.
“It’s just kind of shocking when any kind of anti-Semitic or hate rhetoric happens in our community,” she told Fox29. “It’s especially shocking when it happens in your driveway.”
The anti-Semitic hate group staged a protest outside a local church on the weekend. The next morning, hundreds of residents woke up to the group’s flyers in front of their homes.
On Tuesday, residents reported hearing the group yelling anti-Jewish slurs across the street from the Jewish Community Center.
Nammie Ichilov, CEO of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio, said that while they were told the protestors came from out of state, any hateful incident still needs to be taken seriously.
“San Antonio is a place of coming together. San Antonio is a place that we have been welcomed as a Jewish community,” he told the news outlet.
JCC president Saul Levenshus added that while the city has seen occasional anti-Semitic incidents in the last few years, they have been relatively rare until now.
Both leaders said that the timing of the protest was not coincidental as it fell on the day that a Holocaust memorial event was taking place.
Police were called it to make sure the small group of anti-Semitic protestors stayed on the sidewalk.
San Antonia Mayor Ron Nirenberg said in a statement that “amid a rise of anti-Semitic incidents in our community, we must stand with our Jewish neighbors and reject the hatred and ignorance that endangers the spirit of our entire city.”
He added: “San Antonio will not tolerate these heinous acts and we will never give a platform to white nationalists.”