Swastikas Found Scrawled in Brooklyn

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn — Swastikas and hateful messages aimed at Jews were spray-painted on buildings and cars in more than a dozen locations in Brooklyn Heights on Monday night and yesterday, and fliers with savage epithets were found in three locations there, the police said.

There were no arrests yesterday, but more than 20 detectives were assigned to the case, as were dozens of officers in uniform and plainclothes, along with members of the department’s Hate Crime Task Force. A city truck equipped with tools and chemicals to remove graffiti was also dispatched.

The crimes in Brooklyn Heights came as the authorities in New Jersey tried to unravel another mystery in Mercer County, where a State Police helicopter discovered on Friday a swastika about the size of a football field, visible only from the air, that had been cut into a cornfield.

After investigating the case over the weekend, New Jersey authorities confirmed reports of the discovery yesterday.

Although anti-Semitic graffiti has cropped up periodically across the region, the police and residents said the scale and timing of the latest cases were troubling. Two people were arrested earlier this month and accused of scrawling swastikas and other graffiti on the side of a synagogue, and on a school bus, an elementary school and a house on Long Island.

“The intensity and the number of incidents in a relatively small area on the Jewish holidays all combined to cause us to assign significant resources to the case,” Paul J. Browne, a New York police spokesman, said of the Brooklyn vandalism. Yom Kippur ended on Saturday and Sukkot begins tomorrow.

The police said yesterday that anti-Semitic graffiti was found on two synagogues, seven residential buildings, three parked vehicles, a park building and two sections of sidewalk, and that the slur-filled fliers had been placed on three cars.

Some wondered if the vandalism was related to the visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to the United Nations and Columbia University. Mr. Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a myth.

“It is unfortunate because of the president of Iran, who talked about negating the existence of the Holocaust and brought out the hatemongers,” said Rabbi Aaron Raskin of the Congregation B’nai Avraham on Remsen Street, one of the synagogues that was struck. A swastika was slashed in black spray paint on its front steps.

Rabbi Raskin recalled preparing for a service at 9 p.m. on Monday when a congregant ran in. “He said, ‘Rabbi, did you see the swastika on the steps?’ and I thought he was kidding,” the rabbi said. “I couldn’t believe in today’s day and age there would be such acts of anti-Semitism and racial bias.”

In New Jersey, the mystery in Washington Township, a bucolic area near Trenton where single-family homes line the edges of soy and cornfields, the specter of a huge swastika seemed bizarre.

But the authorities said that in 1998 and 1999, swastikas were found cut into the cornfield on land opposite the field where the one was discovered on Friday, the authorities said.

No one was charged in either case.

Chuck Petty, a lieutenant with the Washington Township Police Department, said yesterday that the latest swastika had been cut into the field by hand, leaving investigators with little possibility of tracking down any equipment that could have otherwise been used.

Since Friday, the New Jersey authorities said, they had pursued their investigation quietly. Yesterday, after several news reports of the discovery, Martin Masseroni, the Washington Township police chief, worried openly that the trail was cold.

“If we had any chance of catching anybody, obviously, that’s over,” he was quoted as telling The Times of Trenton.

In Brooklyn Heights, where churches, synagogues and a mosque have served their congregants without incident for decades, people said yesterday that they were more puzzled than threatened by the vandalism.

Besides the two synagogues, the vandals apparently made little effort to single out Jewish property, and swept through quickly, leaving black scrawls of paint and crude leaflets laced with such messages as “kill all Jews.”

The vandals spray-painted a particularly large mark — a 4-foot-high swastika — about 7 p.m. on Monday in an unlocked vestibule of an apartment building on Columbia Place.

“Nobody has any idea how it got there,” Daniel Brunetti, a resident of the building, said yesterday.

Rabbi Serge Lippe of the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue, which was also hit with a swastika on its front step, managed to find a silver lining in the community’s reaction to the graffiti spree.

“Today,” he said, “I think everybody in the Heights feels Jewish.”