After Jewish student center’s sign is vandalized, rabbi calls for ‘acts of kindness’
The sign and menorah outside the Jewish Student Center near the UK campus were vandalized this past weekend, the center’s rabbi said Monday.
Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, the director of Chabad of the Bluegrass, said he discovered the “bashed-in” sign and evidence that someone had tried to take down the menorah on Sunday afternoon. Both the sign and the large menorah sit in the yard of the center on Columbia Ave. Litvin contacted the police.
An officer took a report for criminal mischief on the same day, Lexington Police spokesperson Brenna Angel said. It’s unclear exactly when the sign was damaged. Litvin said he wasn’t home when the vandalism occurred.
Litvin said the vandalism follows threats made against him over-the-phone in August, after he’d publicly vowed to teach against pamphlets dropped around Central Kentucky by a neo-Nazi group. The rabbi also pointed to a continuing trend of recent anti-Semitic violence against Jewish student centers across the country — including an arson that caused close to $200,000 worth of damage to the Chabad Center at the University of Delaware.
This is the fourth time the Jewish Student Center’s sign has been damaged, Litvin said. After previous damage to the sign, he said they’d installed a stronger sign, but that was likely damaged beyond repair this weekend.
Litvin said the center asks for statements of support from the community and for individuals to perform “acts of kindness to counter this act of darkness.”
In response to the vandalism, Litvin summarized his mentor, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who “said that each one of us has given given a light and we can be the answer to that darkness.” When the sign outside the center was ripped off its posts by vandals in January 2018, Litvin had a similar response. He and his daughter rode the sign down a snowy hill on campus in front of dozens of sledders.
“Because a broken sign can be used in two ways,” Litvin told the Kentucky Kernel in 2018. “It can be used as an object of fear, of intimidation; but even a broken sign can be used as an object of joy and love, and I chose to do that.”
The students of the center and Litvin are meeting in the coming days to plan a formal response, he said. In the meantime, the Jewish Student Center’s services and events — which have lately been occurring outside or over Zoom — won’t be affected.