On June 18, a person wrote the phrase “Genocide in Gaza” on a photograph of a child Holocaust survivor in the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle.
After the incident, the Seattle Police reported that they classified the incident as “non-criminal bias motivated by political ideology.” The main arguments behind the decision were that the message had been written with a pen and removed harmlessly.
Based on the decision of the police authorities, a group of seven museums of the Holocaust in the United States issued a joint statement condemning the act of vandalism as “openly anti-Semitic.” In addition to the Seattle center, the other seven museums were the three major Holocaust centers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, the Cincinnati Jewish Heritage Center in New York, and the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
The statement stated that “the senseless scapegoating of Jews did not begin and end with the Holocaust. “It has been going on for thousands of years, and while the pretext may change, the anti-Semitic motivation is the same.”