NY shopping center blasted with ‘genocide supporter’ graffiti across from Jewish Community Center
A suburban shopping center in Westchester County was blasted with antisemitic graffiti overnight, with Gov. Kathy Hochul saying the incident has the community ‘traumatized.’
Cops are looking for a lone vandal who painted “genocide supporter” on the window of two stores at the Golden Horseshoe Shopping Center in New Rochelle, across from the JCC of Mid-Westchester, with surveillance video catching the culprit in the act,” CBS-TV News reporter Tony Aiello said in a post on X.
Speaking at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan Thursday, Hochul said she planned to speak to Westchester DA Miriam Rocah about the incident.
“I’m going to talk to her about something that she just experienced as a district attorney because just overnight there were horrific images and hateful speech scrawled on the front of Jewish businesses here between New Rochelle and Scarsdale,” she said.
“And the community is traumatized,” Hochul added. “You may think they’re only words on a sign or across a storefront, but it tears at you as a human being when you know that attack-full message, that hateful message, is meant for you.”
Security camera footage obtained by CBS shows the vandal, wearing an unzipped hoodie and dark pants, scrawling the hate message on the storefront in the middle of the night.
Jewish storeowners at the shopping center, which is in New Rochelle but has a Scarsdale mailing address, have called for an “ice cream meet-up” at the Wilmot Road retail outlet later on Thursday.
“Hate has no home in Westchester,” the online announcement reads.
New Rochelle Police Capt. J. Collins Coyne told The Post on Thursday that the graffiti was discovered early in the morning by a police officer on patrol.
“It is currently an active investigation and we don’t have anything else to release at this time,” Coyne said. “The Westchester DA investigators are also assisting us.”
Incidents of antisemitic graffiti and anti-Israeli protests have spiked in the New York metro area since the Oct. 7 sneak attack on Israel by radical Hamas terrorists, which prompted a massive military response by the Jewish State in the Gaza Strip.
