Search

Antisemitic flyers target LA Jews on Passover

Flyers blaming Russia-Ukraine conflict on Jews distributed five months after leaflets blaming COVID on Jews disseminated on first night of Chanukah.

By World Israel News Staff

Residents of heavily Jewish neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills woke up on Saturday morning — the first day of the Passover holiday — to antisemitic flyers on their doorsteps that blamed the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine on Jews.

“Every single aspect of the Ukraine-Russia war is Jewish,” the flyer begins, accompanied by a list of Ukrainian and Russian government officials who are allegedly Jewish or of Jewish heritage.

The flyer included an image of a yellow star reading “Jude,” which Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, and images of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodoymr Zelensky wearing skullcaps.

The timing of the distribution of the flyers appears to be intentional. Antisemitic flyers blaming the COVID pandemic on Jews were disseminated in the same areas on the first night of Chanukah in December 2021.

The flyers were sealed in a plastic sandwich bag with rice, apparently to stop them from blowing away in the wind.

Residents first began notifying police in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles about the flyers beginning at about 7 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Read  Orthodox Jewish Chicago man, 39, shot en route to synagogue on Shabbat

“It’s still pretty fresh, we’re still figuring out where they all are,” Beverly Hills Police Sgt. Ryan Dolan told the Los Angeles Times.

He added that the flyers did not explicitly mention violence against Jews and said “there is no credible threat to people right now.”

The Los Angeles area has seen a massive uptick of antisemitic assaults and vandalism in recent years.

Jeffrey Abrams, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Los Angeles, told the LA Times that his organization has noted a 40 percent increase in antisemitic attacks since 2017.

In May 2021, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters attacked Iranian-American Jews who were eating at a sushi restaurant during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

After asking if the men were Jewish — to which they answered yes — the protesters began violently beating the diners in an unprovoked attack.