Residents of the Hasidic village of New Square were horrified Tuesday night to find the words ‘GET OUT’ and large Nazi swastikas were painted in black on a fence that borders the community on Polnoya Road.
The six-foot fence separates a school in the village from a rehabilitation facility in New City, on the other side. Ramapo Police detectives were summoned to the scene at around 8 pm.
Yossi Gestetner, spokesperson for the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, said he believes the vandalism comes as the “result of an ongoing effort to delegitimize and intimidate the Jewish community.” Gestetner told Channel 12 News that it’s high time for officials to “strong, swiftly, unequivocally condemn these attacks.”
(Anyone with information is asked to call Ramapo Police Department at 845-357-2400.)
This is not the first time vicious anti-Semitic vandalism has been directed at New Square.
Earlier this month, The Journal News/Iohud reported similar swastikas and other hate grafitti were spray-painted on a dozen trees in New City. The case had first made headlines back in July, but the trees remained painted with hate for months, and Clarkstown police have yet to make an arrest, Iohud reported.
Last August, three powerful M-98 fireworks were also ignited outside the homes of two Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis in Rockland. In that case, Iohud reported that police had identified young suspects but did not have enough evidence to charge them.
The property owner of the wooded area, meanwhile, finally painted over the swastikas – after the grafitti was reported in the media.
New Square is inhabited by members of the Skverrer Hasidic group, who originate from Ukraine and came with the Skverrer Rebbe to the United States after the Holocaust.
The village of New Square was formed in 1961 after the Skverrer Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Twersky, sent a group from Williamsburg, New York to settle on a 130-acre dairy farm on Route 45 that had been purchased in 1954.