By Dani Hemmat, Special to JTNews
As schoolchildren on Bainbridge Island hustled toward the front doors of Blakely Elementary on the morning of February 4, they brushed past outside walls and doors masked with large sheets of brown paper. As soon as they were seated at their studies, school custodians were charged with the task of quickly and discreetly removing the hate-filled graffiti that marred the walls underneath the paper.
“Kike,” “Jesus Hates Jews,” and a drawing of a hangman’s noose with a figure marked “Dead Jew” were scrawled in black paint across the outside of the school. The walls were also sprayed with the name of a Jewish teacher employed at the school, along with various obscenities.
Four days later, a Bainbridge Island police detective contacted two suspects after several local tips. The alleged perpetrators, two middle school boys, had videotaped themselves as they painted. During questioning, one boy cried. While they claimed that their inspiration for the vandalism was a cartoon, Detective Christian Hemion’s impression was altogether different.
“I firmly believe that what they did qualifies as malicious harassment. I think their intent was to disturb and offend the community,” said Detective Hemion. “I don’t think that they’re burgeoning skinheads, but they knew what they were doing. They knew the impact of those words.”
Hemion immediately offered himself up as a community resource officer for Congregation Kol Shalom, the island’s synagogue. He met with the board soon after he had questioned the alleged perpetrators, assuring board members that the B.I. police department was sending the case to the Kitsap County prosecutor’s office with the recommendation that the case be charged as malicious mischief (vandalism) and malicious harassment, Washington’s hate-crime statute.
“We are committed to taking care of the people who are affected by this — the Jewish community, the school — that’s the bottom line,” Hemion said of the recommendation. The county prosecutor’s office had not yet charged the case at press time.
While such a crime might seem out of place on this idyllic island eight miles west of Seattle, it’s part of a pattern that has been going on for years. Since 2000, an anti-Semitic crime has been reported on Bainbridge Island each year except during 2004-05. Cemetery desecration, neo-Nazi propaganda fliers tucked into crayon boxes on drugstore shelves, swastikas scrawled on fences. It’s a problem that rears its head almost annually — and not much has changed with how Island community leaders are handling it.
Rabbi Mark Glickman of Congregation Kol Shalom hopes to help change that.
“It’s important that we have a healthy perspective,” he said. “On the one hand, we can’t be catastrophists — these were young people who did something really stupid and our legal system is dealing with them. We [as Jews] don’t have to worry about leaving our houses. On the other hand, this is something that is happening more and more, and it needs to be addressed.”
Rabbi Glickman said that his congregation would contact city leaders to confront hate-crime issues and to help educate the community.
“We need to actively work to teach our young people — and some of our older ones — who our neighbors are and how to live with them,” he said.
Glickman also notes that the Bainbridge Island Jewish community has more than once suggested to the school district that it employ the Anti-Defamation League’s tolerance education program, but the district has always passed on the suggestion.
One island resident and local Jewish activist, Janet Levy Pauli, with her husband William, had several years ago offered to completely fund the ADL’s anti-bias workshop for the entire Bainbridge Island school district. And while the ADL approached the school district several times, the district has declined those offers of free tolerance training and education as well.
“[The district] essentially told us that they take care of it in their existing curriculum,” said Pauli, whose son was harassed for two years at the high school. And while she’s disappointed in the community’s lack of preventative action, she doesn’t think it’s a problem exclusive to Bainbridge Island.
“I think you could take any given neighborhood in Seattle and find the same thing as what’s happening here,” Pauli said. “Bainbridge is a small community—pretty tolerant and well educated, but it still tells you what simmers, what lies beneath. Tolerance needs to be taught, and respect for people’s differences needs to be taught. I don’t think we teach it enough.”
Hilary Bernstein, education director and interim executive director for the ADL’s Pacific Northwest chapter, said they’ve provided the training to hundreds of teachers and students throughout the area, from districts as small as Mercer Island to as large as Federal Way.
“One of the goals is to help people move from being bystanders to being allies to each other,” said Bernstein. “We take this occurrence very seriously. No one is born prejudiced. Prejudice is learned. And if it is learned, it can be unlearned.”