Road workers on Thursday began removing antisemitic writings that unidentified individuals had painted on long stretches of a countryside traffic artery north of Dublin, Ireland’s chief rabbi said.
The pavement markings were painted in a repeating pattern in white paint on a road in County Louth and discovered on Wednesday. They read “Jew rat” and featured Stars of David and Nazi swastikas.
Irish police said they were investigating the incident as an antisemitic hate crime, The Irish Times reported. The same graffiti was documented on Road 165 near Ardee, not far from where similar markings were painted several times in 2019.
Council workers were seen on Thursday working to remove the markings, Irish Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder told JNS, though he wasn’t sure whether the work had been completed by Friday.
“This is clearly part of a much wider trend that many within Ireland’s political and media class are still refusing to acknowledge,” Wieder added about the incident. “That refusal, and the failure to respond seriously, only serves to embolden those responsible.”
Wieder called the markings “expressions of hate [those who] are seeking to intimidate Jewish people in Ireland and to make them live in fear. Our response is clear: We are strong, we are resilient, and we will continue to express our identity openly and proudly.”
Ireland has about 3,500 Jews, according to a 2020 study. Its government has adopted one of the most hostile policies vis-à-vis Israel of any European Union member state. Ireland has intervened in favor of South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel for alleged genocide in Gaza, alongside Spain and Belgium.
Leaders of Ireland’s Jewish community have condemned the government’s hostility to Israel as unjustified and immoral, and have warned it is encouraging antisemitic rhetoric that is making Irish society increasingly inhospitable to Jews.
Holocaust Awareness Ireland, a group devoted to fighting antisemitism, recently called out the phenomenon’s proliferation even among organizations that purport to promote human rights. Holocaust Awareness Ireland said in a statement that the graffiti “repeats one of the most disturbing anti-Semitic caricatures deployed by Nazis in pre-war Germany.”
Graffiti, the group added, “is a bellwether of national sentiment. It makes a statement on the bystander and the implications of a citizenry that accepts such explicit threats to a single ethnic minority, in public view.”
