East Meadow responds to antisemitic graffiti

The East Meadow community awoke on Monday to an act of antisemitism. Antisemitic graffiti was found spray-painted on a long stretch of fencing on Merrick Avenue, a few blocks south of Front Street, including statements like “Zionism is Nazism,” “Stop the Genocide” and “Free Palestine.”

The heavily trafficked road connects Bellmore and Merrick to East Meadow, and the graffiti was found just a mile from the East Meadow Beth-El Jewish Center. Neighborhoods nearby have a large number of Jewish residents.

As Israel’s war on Hamas continues in the Middle East, antisemitism remains on the rise in the United States, and Monday’s incident sparked outrage from the local community and elected officials.

Debbie Habshoosh, whose yard backs up to Merrick Avenue, began displaying flyers on her fence last fall, showing photos of hostages taken by Hamas when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Habshoosh’s husband is Israeli, she told the Herald, and in the six months since she put up the flyers, they haven’t been touched.

But on Monday, she discovered that they had been defaced by the graffiti, which wasn’t confined to her fence. Many of her neighbors’ fences had been vandalized as well.

While it was unclear exactly when the graffiti was spray-painted, Habshoosh said she checked her fence at around 10 p.m. on Sunday, and it had not been tampered with.

“I have never seen such a brazen attack on our friends of the Jewish faith,” Hempstead Town Supervisor Don Clavin said at a news conference on Monday, arranged in response to the incident. “We should all be outraged, and we should all make a commitment that we are not going to stand for antisemitism in our communities.”

Clavin was joined by Town Councilmen Chris Carini and Dennis Dunne, Receiver of Taxes Jeanine Driscoll, County Legislator Tom McKevitt and District Attorney Anne Donnelly, as well as dozens of East Meadow residents.

Clavin called East Meadow “the heartbeat” of the Town of Hempstead.

“This is a thriving community with many individuals of many faiths, but a hard-practicing congregation is just blocks away that I’ve been to many times,” he added. “I’ve never been so disgusted in my entire life as a public official.”

Donnelly said the incident could be categorized as a hate crime, which means it was motivated by bias. She added that her office has seen an increase in hate crimes in the past six months, and is aggressively prosecuting those who are responsible.

“Hate crimes are not acceptable in our town,” Donnelly said. “To our Jewish brothers and sisters, my heart hurts for you today. This is not something you should have to see. This is not something that you should have to put up with. I stand by you and stand with you, and will prosecute the individual and work with the police department to find out who did this.”

The Town of Hempstead’s Quality of Life task force, which was created by Carini, promptly began to remove the graffiti from the fences.

“We must stand firm with our ally,” Carini said, referring to Israel. “We must stand firm against antisemitism. We must stand firm against international terrorism. And we must demand that Albany fixes our broken criminal justice system and holds these criminals accountable.”

Rabbi Aaron Marsh, the spiritual leader of East Meadow Beth-El, said, “We read about these things in the news — you see them on the news all the time, but to see it happening two minutes from our synagogue here, it’s something else.”

Marsh added everyone has the right to their beliefs, but to deface property is outrageous. “It’s an act of intimidation,” he said.

The sidewalk in front of East Meadow Beth-El was also defaced by the spray-painted words “Free Palestine.”

The Nassau County Police Department and the district attorney’s office began investigating the graffiti at around 6:20 a.m. on Monday morning, and asked residents to check their homes’ cameras and report anything suspicious to the police or the D.A.’s office.

At around 1:40 a.m. on Tuesday, police announced that Sebastian Patino Caceres, 23, of East Meadow, had been arrested in connection to the incident. Caceres was charged with seven counts of criminal mischief, possession of graffiti instruments and seven counts of making graffiti. He was arraigned on Tuesday at First District Court in Hempstead.

“The location of this hateful act was not chosen by accident,” McKevitt, who also lives in East Meadow, said. “This is a portion of East Meadow which has a very large Jewish community. It was designed to incite violence and hate, which we will not tolerate here.”