North Side antisemitism caps another week of worry for Jewish community
Painted on the sidewalk outside of the North Side house Deborah shares with her family was the Nazi slogan “For Blood and Soil.”
“Deborah” (a pseudonym) knew when she checked the security cameras recording activity in front of her house that there was a problem.
“I saw it on a still shot on the camera. You see him holding the spray can. I thought, ‘OK, this is bad.’ I opened my bedroom window, and I could see part of the graffiti,” she said.
Painted on the sidewalk outside of the North Side house Deborah shares with her family was the Nazi slogan “For Blood and Soil.”
The slogan was used in Nazi Germany to evoke the idea of a pure Aryan race and the territory the Nazis wanted to conquer, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concept was foundational to Nazi ideology. “Blood” refers to a racially pure Aryan people, and “soil” evokes a special relationship between the people and their land.
The glass on Deborah’s front door was also defaced with photos, presumably of dead children in Gaza killed during Israel’s war with the terrorist group Hamas.
The graffiti and photos were just the latest salvo in a series of distressing incidents that the family has endured.
On April 2, Deborah’s family received propaganda shoved into their mail slot with pictures of dead children. “The child murders of Gaza” was scrawled on the paper with a marker.
Deborah also noticed that their small Israeli flag placed in their flowerbed had been removed.
“I later found it in the alley, and it had a footprint on it in mud and had been trampled,” she said.
Deborah called the police, filed a report and went about her life.
On April 4, the family received two more pieces of anti-Israel propaganda in their mail slot, and their Israeli flag was defaced with the words, “We demand blood.” Deborah understood those words as a death threat.
She contacted the police again.
“This time, they sent officers to the house who took pictures with the report,” she said. “We didn’t have cameras though.”
That changed as the family had two cameras installed later that night.
Bad weather and record-breaking rain hit the Pittsburgh region over the next several days, and no other incidents occurred.
But on April 19, Deborah’s cameras captured images of a man taking the family’s Israeli flag and tossing it in the garbage.
The family filed another report with the police and installed more cameras.
Two days later, one of the cameras captured a person painting graffiti and affixing the disturbing images to their front door.
Once more, the police came to examine the evidence.
“They were like, ‘That’s a slogan, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes, that would be a Nazi slogan on my sidewalk.’ They looked at each other, and I was like, ‘This is bad,’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’”
Police were only part of the response, though.
Deborah got support from City Controller Rachael Heisler, who she said has “been fabulous”; Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey; City Councilperson Bobby Wilson; Sen. John Fetterman’s wife, Gisele Fetterman; and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, as well as other elected officials and a Pittsburgh police detective with whom they met the next day.
The North Side resident said she also spoke with the FBI, which is investigating the case along with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.
Four days after the incident was reported, law enforcement officials said they had identified a person captured by the video, whose image was widely distributed in local media.
Deborah also contacted Shawn Brokos, director of community security for the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, and kept her up to date on each attack.
Brokos said she appreciated the swift attention by law enforcement and that she was surprised by the antisemitism occurring on the North Side, a neighborhood generally free from that sort of activity.
Brokos doesn’t expect to see a rise in antisemitism in the community once the situation is resolved. Still, she said the response from law enforcement and local politicians was warranted and urged those who see antisemitism to report it on the Federation’s website, jewishpgh.org/form/incident-report and to local police.
“We’ve shown this is not OK,” Brokos said. “You cannot terrorize or victimize your neighbors because of their beliefs. You may not like them, but you cannot desecrate their private property and/or intimidate them or threaten them in any way.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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