My husband and I were sitting on a tarmac at Newark Airport, just having landed from a vacation in France, relieved to come home, where we could be openly Jewish again. Visits to that country are always laced with stress for us, Orthodox Jews whose appearance broadcasts our identity. Being home meant that my husband, a rabbi, didn’t have to hide his kipa or tuck in his tzitzis. It meant we no longer had to check emergency exit signs in kosher restaurants, or change the subject when cabdrivers asked us where we’re from.

Then I turned on my phone.

I saw immediately that several people — friends, acquaintances, fellow synagogue members — had texted me the same disturbing image: It was a Twitter profile with the name “David Goldberg.” The bio read: “Orthodox Jew against the apartheid state of Israel.” But the photograph was of my Jerusalem-born husband, Benjamin.

Staring at the image on my phone, an image of a large “Boycott Israel” sign behind my husband’s photo, I wondered about the country I had just returned to. As I scrolled through the troll’s account, reading the tweets denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland next to a photograph of my husband’s face, the sense of violation was no less than if someone in France had shouted “Juif!” at us on the street.

Benjamin’s photo was not the only one stolen. The identity theft was part of a larger scheme that had been organized on 4chan, the notorious online forum where white supremacists reign. Dozens of Jews from diverse backgrounds were affected. Among them: a Chabad-affiliated rabbi, Mendel Kaplan; Josh Goldberg, a Reform cantor in Los Angeles; and Hen Mazzig, a Mizrahi Israel i gay activist. (All of these have since been removed. Who knows if others still lurk?)