This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Police said Friday they are investigating antisemitic vandalism inside a New York synagogue, less than a week after the deadliest attack on American Jews and amid a rash of other antisemitic incidents.

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The discovery of antisemitic graffiti inside Union Temple, in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, prompted the cancelation of a political event hosted by Broad City’s Ilana Glazer, according to CBS.

Police received a call at about 8pm on Thursday reporting “antisemitic graffiti written in black marker” at the congregation.

Nobody has been arrested in relation to the vandalism, which is being investigated by the NYPD’s hate crimes taskforce.

Critics of Donald Trump have said that his bombastic rhetoric against minorities and immigrants has fanned the flames of antisemitism in the US as has his repetition of the conspiracy theory that Jewish-Hungarian financier George Soros has paid anti-Trump protesters to demonstrate and is funding US-bound migrant caravans from Central America.

TheNew York vandalism is among a handful of antisemitic incidents across the US reported mere days after a gunman killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Police in Irvine, California are investigating antisemitic graffiti that was spray-painted on an area synagogue, according a report in USA Today , as well as a post on the congregation’s Facebook page.

Officials, who continue to investigate the incident, said they suspected the attack on Beth Jacob Synagogue took place early Wednesday morning.

Congregation officials in their Facebook post said surveillance video showed that “ an individual wearing a hoodie, sunglasses and a surgical face-mask jumped our fence” and spray-painted the exterior wall, before leaving “on a bicycle he apparently stole from our premises.”

A swastika was reportedly found spray-painted on a home in the village of Nelsonville, New York on Wednesday. The vandalized building was “within eyesight” of a school, a local official told the Rockland/Westchester Journal News.

Campus police at Millersville University, located in Millersville, Pennsylvania, are investigating alleged antisemitic vandalism, according to LancasterOnline.

Officials at the college said an individual had written “I hate Jews” in a men’s bathroom. The writing was found on Thursday, the report said.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil rights organization that tracks antisemitic incidents, said up-to-date data was not yet available on the number of such occurrences in 2018.

ADL officials released a report in February showing a recent dramatic year-over-year increase – with 1,986 incidents in 2017 compared to 1,267 incidents in 2016 across the US.

The 57% surge was the “largest single-year increase on record and the second highest number reported since ADL started tracking incident data” since the 1970s, ADL officials said