Police in Oakland, California are investigating after a large public menorah was wrecked—dismantled and thrown into a nearby lake, with antisemitic graffiti scrawled on its cement pedestal—in the early hours of Wednesday, sending shockwaves through the local community.
“I feel afraid,” Rabbi Dovid Labkowski, whose synagogue, the Chabad Center of Oakland, organizes the lighting of the 9-foot-tall Lake Merritt menorah, told the Oaklandside. “It makes me feel angry that this would happen in Oakland, a place with so much diversity. It’s a place we want to live together in peace.”
Labkowski told local station KGO that he’d received a text on Wednesday morning alerting him to the menorah’s destruction. “We found the pieces all over,” he added to the Los Angeles Times. “It just seemed like somebody destroyed it, literally chopped it up into pieces. This is 350 pounds of steel.”
Then there was the “hateful graffiti,” as the rabbi put it. Images of the scene shared by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area appeared to show the words “your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert asshole” scribbled on the cement.
“There’s no room for debate; this vicious act unequivocally deserves condemnation,” the council said in a tweet.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said that she had asked police to investigate the incident as a hate crime. “I want to be very clear that what happened was not just an attack on Oakland's Jewish community but our entire city and our shared values,” she said in a statement. “We stand together against hate, against antisemitism and against bigotry in any form.”
The Oakland Police Department said that it had opened a hate crime investigation into the incident, which investigators believe occurred around 1:30 a.m. local time. No suspects had been identified or arrested as of Thursday, a department spokesperson told ABC News.
Employees with Oakland Public Works cleared the scene Wednesday, cleaning up the graffiti and fishing pieces of the menorah out of the water.
The lighting of the menorah at Lake Merritt is a long-standing tradition that has been conducted for the past 18 years. The vandalism occurred on the sixth day of Hanukkah at a time when authorities have warned of a sharp increase in reported antisemitic incidents around the country. More than 2,000 such reports have been made in the weeks since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil liberties group, also condemned the attack on the menorah.
“The rise in incidents targeting both the Jewish and Muslim communities calls for a collective response against all forms of bigotry,” executive director Zahra Billoo said in a statement to KTVU. “We stand in solidarity with our Jewish neighbors against anti-Semitism, just as we fight against Islamophobia. Hatred against one community is a threat to all.”
After the sun went down on Wednesday, hundreds of members of the Oakland community gathered to relight the menorah. “As we light this final candle in recognition of all of what Hanukkah represents, let’s remember only light can drown out darkness,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at the ceremony. “Only light can drown out hate.”
“What happened last night was horrible,” the Chabad of Oakland said in a social media statement. “But we are stronger than hate. We have outlived all the haters and have amazing Jewish holidays to prove it. In the face of [antisemitism], we stand stronger and prouder and we will only increase in spreading light.”
