A spray-painted swastika was spotted on a tree at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn this weekend.
The hateful graffiti, reported by A Walk in the Park, was discovered Saturday morning.
“There was a swastika spray painted on a tree and what looked like a Polish flag painted on a bench,” Adriann Musson, who runs the Floyd Bennett Field Gardens Association, told Metro.
“One of my gardeners saw it and called me. The park police came out and investigated it. They’re working with the city police to see if they can find out who did it,” said Musson, who grows vegetables in the garden.
A six pack of Polish beer was found in the garden, said Musson, leading her to suspect the graffiti was left behind by drunk youths on Friday night. An anti-police slur, written in Polish, was also spotted tagged on nearby stones.
“I tend to think it was a couple of young people. They probably got a little drunk and got some spray paint and thought it would be a good thing to do,” she said.
Musson said she was very upset by the graffiti.
“We’re a very large community garden over 457 members of every race and every religion and we all get along. Why are they bringing their hate into our garden?” she fumed. “We’ve created a beautiful place —
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we have birds and trees, we don’t need graffiti. Hate only
brings hate.”
Musson said they’ve since spray painted over the swastika on the tree with brown paint, but wondered, “How do I get spray paint off a tree?”
This latest incident is the sixth reported anti-Semitic crime in New York City in the past two weeks.
Also on Saturday, residents in the heavily-Jewish neighborhood of Midwood discovered the message “Die Jews” written alongside three black swastikas on a garage door.
Across the street, two swastikas were also found spray-painted on the door of an apartment building.
And on Sunday morning, two more swastikas were found on a Jewish school on Ocean Parkway, according to police.
Last week, a group is suspected of tagging four stores along Sixth Avenue with swastikas.
A swastika was also discovered at the Kent Village Housing site last week, in a predominantly Jewish section of Williamsburg, according to Councilman Steve Levin, who represents that neighborhood. Some residents of the housing complex are Holocaust survivors, according to Rabbi David Niederman, director of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, and they were appalled to see the swastikas.
