“We’ve done a pretty good job of covering them up,” the Rev. Schuyler Vogel said.

By “them,” he meant two swastikas and the words “race” and “office” that were carved into the front doors of Mr. Vogel’s church, Fourth Universalist Society, on Central Park West at 76th Street, last month. The two words were obscure but ominous: The Nazis had an Office of Racial Policy whose responsibilities included approving SS officers’ marriage plans after investigating the brides-to-be.

With dye, Jeff Collie, the church’s building engineer, reduced the swastikas and the words to little more than scratch marks. But the hurt remains sharp, and in this pocket of the Upper West Side, the shock is still fresh: Had the brutes of bigotry been roused to the point that it could happen here? Was cruelty that close by? Mr. Collie said the last vandalism at the church — graffiti — occurred 12 years ago.

Now, Fourth Universalist finds itself on a list of disturbing statistics. There was a startling increase in hate crimes in New York City from Jan. 1 to March 19 — 122, up from 59 in the same time last year, according to figures from the New York Police Department. Of those 122, by far the most — 72 — were classified as “Semitic,” up 177 percent from 26 in the same period last year. The breakdown does not show how many incidents involved synagogues or, as in this case, a church.

The motivation for the attack, if the attackers were as knowledgeable as they seem, is puzzling. Mr. Vogel said the incident had “long roots that precede the election” — including Donald J. Trump’s affinity for “the language and rhetoric of division,” first as a candidate, then as the president-elect and ultimately as the president.