Antisemitic graffiti was scrawled inside an unoccupied home in O’Fallon, Mo. over the weekend, police said.
The Jewish Federation of St. Louis said the graffiti was found at a home construction site and “included swastikas and offensive anti-Jewish language.”
“We did have vandalism in a house that is unoccupied, and some of the graffiti in there is antisemitic in nature,” Sgt. Bryan Harr, spokesperson for the O’Fallon Police Department, told the Jewish Light . “Our patrol division has developed a couple of suspects, and we are actively investigating.”
The vandalism was reported Sunday morning and likely carried out overnight, Harr said. Police declined to say precisely what the vandals scrawled on the property.
The graffiti incident was reported a few hours before a man in Boulder, Co. threw two lit Molotov cocktails into a crowd of people walking to raise awareness about Israeli hostages still in captivity, federal authorities said.
According to a federal court affidavit filed by the FBI, firebombing suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, shouted “Free Palestine” during the attack and later told investigators he “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.”
Soliman was charged with a federal hate crime Monday.
The Jewish Federation of St. Louis said in a statement that while the antisemitic graffiti in O’Fallon and the Boulder firebombing are not directly connected, “they are the most recent in an increasing number of threats, physical attacks and murder of Jews on U.S. soil.”
“Coming on the same day as a terror attack in Colorado, and only two weeks after Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., we are again tragically reminded of what happens when hate speech goes unchecked and when people who spread antisemitic ideologies in public forums and on social media are not held accountable,” said Danny Cohn, the Federation’s president and CEO.
In recent months, vandals have also defaced property with antisemitic graffiti at Glenridge Elementary School in Clayton and Affton High School in Affton. Police made arrests in both cases.
Cohn called on allies of the Jewish community to show their support at a time of rising antisemitism.
“Our ask of our friends, neighbors and colleagues in our community is to show us that we are not alone in the fight against this hate,” Cohn said.