In a stunning display of intolerance, Sixth Avenue in Park Slope was littered with strips of papers reading “KILL JEWS” in capital letters from Fourth to Ninth streets last Wednesday.
Nearly two dozen of the strips were picked up by Karen Guilbert, who had just finished walking her daughter to school.
“It’s so ignorant and hateful,” said Guilbert, who picked up a handful of the same slips back in October. “There are hundreds of kids that walk up and down this street.”
Before she turned the slips over to the police, Guilbert played amateur detective by turning the strips over and piecing them together. All that emerged was that the slips had been cut from a document from a taxi driving school. Yet there were no addresses or phone numbers on the strips that offered any further clues.
“Someone is trying to be a taxi driver,” Guilbert nervously joked. “I sure hope I don’t end up in his car.”
An officer from the 78th Precinct said he turned the notes over to the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Unit, but the department had no official comment.
Most unsettling, this is not the first time the craven anti-Semitic litterer has struck.
A month before Guilbert’s Halloween discovery, the same notes turned up in Bay Ridge, Boerum Hill and Clinton Hill.
To top it off, vandals struck two synagogues in Brooklyn Heights in 2007 and left the same message on car windshields.
In response to this latest attack, a rainbow coalition of politicians and other leaders gathered at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope to condemn anti-Semitism.
Councilman Brad Lander (D–Park Slope) convened the gathering, which included Borough President Markowitz, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D–Park Slope), Councilman Steve Levin (D–Williamsburg) and Rabbi Andy Bachman.
Notably absent from the public stage was an officer or official from the NYPD. One cop was on hand in the back of the room, but he declined to comment.
Markowitz spoke most eloquently.
“Ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine-plus percent of us, we get along,” he said. “But among us there are a few mutants. I assure you this mutant will be apprehended.”