Newburgh, N.Y., a town of about 31,825 located some 70 miles north of Manhattan, is probing a Nazi swastika on a campaign sign as a hate crime, its police chief told JNS.
A swastika was spray-painted on both sides of the sign for Scott Manley, a Jewish Republican running for town supervisor who currently serves as deputy supervisor, Manley told JNS.
“It is early in the investigation and no arrests have been made at this point,” Donald Bruce Campbell, chief of the town’s Police Department, told JNS on Thursday.
Newburgh is located in New York’s Hudson Valley, in Orange County, about 17 miles from the Chassidic enclave of Kiryas Joel.
Newburgh has an established Jewish community, including Kol Yisrael, a Jewish community center that houses Congregation Agudas Israel and Temple Beth Jacob, Manley told JNS.
He was in the middle of a radio interview on Wednesday morning when he received a text message alerting him to the swastika, he said. Less than two minutes later, another friend drove past the sign on Lakeside Road near Orange Lake, took a photograph and sent it to him.
“My stomach just turned,” Manley told JNS. “I missed a question on the radio interview.”
As soon as the interview ended, Manley drove to the sign and contacted the police chief, who dispatched an officer to the scene, he said.
“You always felt safe in your community,” Manley told JNS. “It was one thing to get the picture yesterday, but when I pulled up and saw it, you know, for the first time,” he became emotional.
“The first thing I thought of was my mom because her family went through a lot,” he said.
Manley said his nephew had researched their family genealogy and discovered that more than 200 relatives, mostly in the Netherlands, had been killed in the Holocaust.
“It really affected me,” he told JNS. “I was just in shock.”
Manley, who served 25 years with the Town of Newburgh Police Department before retiring as a sergeant in 2008, told JNS that he had never encountered similar antisemitic vandalism in the town.
“I unfortunately do see reports of these markings over the years, but I never thought it would happen in my town,” he said.
“For my town, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he added. “Unfortunately, we have seen it in other parts of the county.”
Manley recalled experiencing antisemitism as a sixth-grader in upstate New York, where most of his classmates were Catholic.
He told JNS that he was the only student in his class who did not leave school for Catholic religious education classes and that other children picked on him because of it.
“I never really understood it,” he said. “When I got older, when I more understood it, I was like, you know, it’s racism and bigotry.”
Manley said his campaign signs had previously been defaced with black marker and stickers depicting his Democratic opponent, Stephen Krasner, but that Wednesday’s incident was the first involving antisemitism.
Krasner decried the vandalism on Wednesday and posted an image of himself at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“As a Jewish American who walked through Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration and extermination camps alongside Holocaust survivors during the March of the Living, I understand deeply the devastating consequences of hatred and intolerance,” he said.
“That experience has stayed with me throughout my life,” he stated. “Defacing any political sign with a swastika is vile and reprehensible, regardless of political affiliation.”
“Antisemitism and hatred have absolutely no place in our community,” he said.
