Jewish mom confronts man for allegedly drawing swastika on groceries | Maqvi News

Article content

An alleged anti-Semitic incident late last year left a California woman shaken.

Leah Grossman, a Jewish single mom raising two young boys, said her doorbell camera recorded her neighbour drawing what appeared to be a swastika on a box of seltzer outside of her West Hollywood, Calif., home on Dec. 5.

Article content

“And I just shattered,” Grossman told CBS affiliate KCAL. “You know, I just fell to pieces. Like I’ve never shook like that before. My toes were shaking. I get emotional thinking about it because it reminds me of all the people I know, my family, my children.”

Grossman said she immediately confronted the neighbour, retired pastor Mark Nakagawa, who was also a former senior official at the United Methodist Church.

Article content

“Is there a problem?” she asks in another video of her confronting a man, who is allegedly Nakagawa. He replies, “What?” She asks again if there was a problem and the man says, “No.”

Grossman said she pointed out what appeared to be a Nazi symbol written on her groceries. In the video, Nakagawa denies writing anything. “I’m just walking by here. I don’t know,” he says.

She tells Nakagawa that her camera caught him drawing the symbol on her groceries.

“I have a camera,” she says. “Like, what is that? What did you draw there?”

Article content

“I don’t know,” he replies.

Grossman said she was called a fascist after she hung the Israeli flag from her balcony following the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.

“What’s going on in the world has really opened up a crevasse of anti-Semitism and I think people feel really emboldened to push Jewish people around,” Grossman said. “People just shouldn’t get away with this.”

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

Nakagawa said Grossman called him a fascist. He also said that he was trying to educate her about the history of the swastika, which is used by different faiths and means the “mark of well-being” in Sanskrit.

He didn’t deny writing the symbol and added he didn’t know how she would react.

“The way I went about it, in hindsight, the way I went about it was not the right away to go about it,” said Nakagawa. “It was bad judgment on my part. I realize that.”

Article content