Avenues residents find anti-Semitic flyers
Avenues neighborhood residents discovered anti-Semitic flyers at their homes Tuesday morning, harkening to other incidents of hate.
Chico Police Department officers responded to a call from Arcadian Avenue and collected flyers at multiple houses. Delivered in weighed baggies, the printed sheets contain rhetoric against Jews and Israel, illustrated with mug shots of prominent Jewish Americans with a Star of David on each forehead. These resemble flyers distributed in north Chico last year.
Police are investigating, according to a department news release, but preliminary information suggests specific individuals weren’t targeted.
Lisa Rappaport, rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel, told this newspaper she did not receive a flyer at her home or the synagogue. Multiple congregants did, and she reported the incident to the Anti-Defamation League, as she has with other recent instances of anti-Semitism locally. Those include vandalism of the temple in November, which police investigated as a hate crime and for which officers arrested a man suspected of the crime two days later.
“They’re usually pocketed in particular neighborhoods,” said Rappaport, CBI’s religious leader since 2019 and a long-time member. “This group — and they’ve done this nationwide — will target a neighborhood and flyer the whole neighborhood.”
Jews nationwide are experiencing a rise in antiSemitism, she said, ranging from “microaggressions to outright acts of violence.” This and other acts have struck a nerve, literally hitting home. She prefers not to name the group and encourages people not to seek it out online, lest the distributors get a wider audience for their message, but said it is important for the Jewish community to know about such incidents.
When the synagogue got defaced in November, Rappaport and her congregation received support not only from the Chico Interfaith Council and Chicoans at large but also people worldwide. That heartened her.
“We’re certainly a very strong community,” she said. “We stood together. It strengthens us.”
Police ask anyone with information to call 8974911 and reference case 23-000930.