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Staffers at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Northwest Portland arrived early on July 29 to find several swastikas painted on the outside of the building.
The swastikas tagged the front door; others covered one of the building’s photo murals. Staffers took photos of the vandalism to send to city officials before cleaning it off. The incident was first reported by The Oregonian.
“We have not had anything like this happen to us before at this location,” Rebekah Sobel, the museum’s executive director, tells WW.
It’s the first antisemitic defacement of the museum’s property since 2021, when someone scrawled swastikas and white supremacist slogans on the Holocaust Memorial in Washington Park.
Sobel says the museum needs to find its power in numbers. “We’re the only Jewish museum and we’re the only center for Holocaust education in the entire state,” she tells WW. “I really think that doubling down on bringing more people to the museum and having the space more activated, by encouraging people to come downtown, come to our exhibitions, come to our programs, and bring their friends, is what’s important. The more visibly activated our spaces are, the less we’re going to see people acting out here.”
A Portland Police Bureau spokesman says a detective from the Major Crimes Unit is investigating the incident as a bias crime.
