Swastikas spray-painted outside US Meeting house
'Record number of hate crimes and related incidents in New Jersey last year, representing a twenty-nine per cent increase since 2020.'
A Friends’ Meeting in the United States has reported two swastikas found spray-painted outside a Quaker cemetery in New Jersey.
Police are investigating the incidents after members of the Haddonfield Friends Meeting discovered the antisemitic graffiti on two trees on either side of the entrance to the graveyard, which faces their Meeting house. The Friends also alerted the media to the offence.
‘I believe that silence in the face of hate is at best a sign of surrender, and at worst amounts to complicity. Even though we are Quakers, there are times when we cannot and should not be silent,’ Dave Austin, clerk for Haddonfield Meeting, said in a statement posted on its website. ‘It is a sad fact that hate crimes of all kinds, especially incidents involving antisemitic hate, have been on the rise in recent years across our state and our country, including locally.’
The discovery on 1 April came the same day that a report showed that there have been a record number of hate crimes and related incidents in New Jersey last year, representing a twenty-nine per cent increase since 2020.
Anti-Jewish bias was cited as a motivation for 347 of the 1,900 incidents reported in 2021. The overall figures are the highest number since New Jersey began separately tracking hate crimes in 1994.
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