Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that on a Saturday night, four families living on Strathmore or Gist saw their white commuter vans covered in black spray painted swastikas and other words of hate?
Our community’s reaction was appropriate outrage.
The police responded with two community meetings expressing solidarity, concern and a pledge to find the person(s) who could do such a thing.
So here we are weeks later and we still haven’t heard that the crime has been solved. And that’s not unusual. Indeed, some crimes just never ever get solved no matter the effort.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of a story I wrote in the early 1980s.
At the time, fires terrorized the Jewish community of West Hartford, Conn. A Conservative shul had to bury several of its sacred Torahs because they were damaged by fire.
A Young Israel rabbi’s study was blackened in soot from a fire.
And a Connecticut elected offical’s home was targeted by fire.
While in West Hartford reporting on the fires, a community official said to me that it wouldn’t surprise him if the arsonist was Jewish.
A Jew, he said, would know better than anyone else these fires would touch a nerve within the Jewish community.
Several weeks later, an arrest was made.
The West Hartford offical was prophetic.
The perp was a Jew, a yeshiva boy at that.
Flash forward to the early part of the new millenia, and we report here in the Jewish Times of a fire at the Etz Chaim building on Fords Lane. The fire damage was so terrible, that the building was beyond repair.
The fire starter, who was never brought to justice, was again, a Jew.
So here we are in the year 2010. A synagogue in Olney is defaced by swastikas by a white supremacist with a Jewish family connection.
Now, about those four white vans here in Baltimore.
The official line is that nobody knows who did the spray painting. The offical line is that there isn’t enough proof to bring anyone to justice.
But I’m betting that a Jewish person did it, an angry Jewish person.
Want a visceral reaction towards anything, go ahead and paint a swastika or the name Hitler.
Who knows better than this?
We do.
Suppose the vandal is a Jew?
Is it then a hate crime he performed?
We think so.
Is it something that should result in an arrest and prosecution?
Yes.
Is it an embarrassment to the Jewish community especially since the police department went out of its way to reassure the Jewish community that it had its back?
Yes it is an embarrassment.
But you know what a bigger embarrassment would be?
If the Jewish community knew that the spray painter was Jewish and covered it up, making the crime “go away” to avoid the attention it would bring.
If this perp is a Jew, then we the citizens of Baltimore deserve the truth.
The Torah, by the way, is the backbone or the code book of truth.
Truth seems to be put away to keep a Jew from going to jail.
Truth needs proof.
But truth also means doing the right thing.
Four vans in the Jewish neighbhorhood weren’t accidentally spray painted with swastikas on the very same night, were they?
Some would even say they know who did the spray painting.
If that’s the case, how Jewish would it be for that person or person’s family to publicly apologize to the citizens of this community and the police who spent man hours and effort trying to figure all of this out.
You, see, I don’t know for sure.
But I do agree with the guy from West Hartford.
I think the spray painter was Jewish.
And if someone is covering this up then I am ashamed that you came out of the High Holidays and you learned nothing.
If you know who did this and aren’t coming forward, you are just as guilty as the vandal.