By Joel Magalnick , Editor, JTNews
Nearly two weeks after the facilities manager found a swastika painted on the side of Temple B’nai Torah, Bellevue police don’t have any leads on who vandalized that building or the church across the street.
“We have no answer to who did it or why, but we don’t take it in any way lightly. We take it very seriously,” said Rabbi Jim Mirel, B’nai Torah’s senior rabbi.
The graffiti, which also had the message “Kill the Jews,” was found between Friday Shabbat services on Feb. 3 and services the next morning. The site was mostly cleaned after the police investigated the incident, so temple goers were not subject to the vandalism, which was painted on a side of the building that is not easily viewable from the front.
Officer Carla Iafrate of the Bellevue Police department said that the case is inactive at this time, pending suspect identification, but that their investigators did take photos and paint samples to enter into evidence.
According to Howard Wasserteil, B’nai Torah’s executive director, the police officer who first visited the scene believed it was malicious mischief and not a direct threat to the congregation or its members. That’s the essence of a message sent to the membership the day following the incident.
“Because we were clear in our communication based on what the police had told us, [it was] just some hateful acts that, as far as we know, were random, we weren’t raising huge alarm bells in what we said to the congregation,” Wasserteil said.
He said all of the responses the temple received from members expressed concern, but none had expressed any kind of alarm.
Mirel, in his remarks to the congregation at Saturday morning services, alluded to the incident.
“I told them we’re not going to be dissuaded or cowed from doing our regular services, we’re not going to overreact to it, we’re always going to maintain our Jewish identity,” he said.
At this time, the synagogue does not have security cameras in the area that may have caught the perpetrators on tape, but B’nai Torah did receive a security grant from the Department of Homeland Security before the vandalism took place, and part of that money had already been earmarked for a camera system, Wasserteil said.
Though anti-Semitic graffiti against Jewish institutions in the area is relatively rare, the Sephardic Bikur Holim and Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath congregations, which are across the street from each other in Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood, were vandalized with swastikas and anti-Semitic epithets just prior to Rosh Hashanah in 2009. Northwest Yeshiva High School on Mercer Island was hit by extensive graffiti a year later.
Wasserteil said the expense of the cleanup was small enough that it wasn’t worth submitting for insurance reimbursement.
Though Mirel called the incident at B’nai Torah minor, he still considers it a hate crime. But he was also philosophical about the episode.
“The authorities are working on it and I’m confident we’ll find the person or people who did it,” he said. “Life goes on and we’re not going to change anything we’re doing because of it.”