Outrage, disbelief echo over latest vandalism to shrine
Civic and religious leaders gathered at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston yesterday to denounce the third act of vandalism at the memorial in less than two months.
“How can this be in this country? It surpasses any possibility of understanding,” said Barry Shrage, president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, his voice faltering.
“What did we see over the weekend in Charlottesville?” Shrage said, referring to the violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia where people chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and where a neo-Nazi is accused of driving into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing one woman and injuring 19.
“If we allow it to get by us without identifying it as evil, then we are culpable,” Shrage said.
Said Bouzit, 37, a resident of a mental health facility, allegedly damaged memorial flowers there yesterday — one day after a Malden 17-year-old was charged with throwing a rock through one of the memorial’s glass panels. The teenager was charged with disorderly conduct, malicious destruction of property over $250 and causing injury over $5,000 to a church, synagogue or memorial, and released on his own recognizance, while Bouzit was charged with disorderly conduct and vandalizing a grave planting, and his bail was revoked in a pending case accusing him of assault and battery on a corrections officer.
This week’s vandalism comes weeks after a 21-yearold with a history of mental illness shattered one of the memorial’s glass panels, which are etched with numbers representing the tattoos on the arms of Jews sent to Nazi death camps.
Saying the wounds from the last time the memorial was vandalized were still fresh, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said the latest incidents, coming days after Charlottesville, made him “worried this is a resurgence of hate.”
“We made it clear yesterday ... there is no place for hate in Boston,” Walsh said. “We give this same message today ... Boston stands with the Jewish community forever and always.”
Israel Arbeiter, an Auschwitz survivor who helped found the memorial, described watching helplessly as a young boy on Oct. 26, 1942, as his parents and brother were taken away to the gas chambers. He said news of the vandalism “hurt me because it was just as if I would have lost a member of my family.”
Shaykh Yasir Fahmy, senior imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, decried the “toxic ideology” that feeds such crimes, and said they are a “call to action.”