Swastika found scratched into window of Jewish bagel shop in Sydney | Sydney
A swastika was found carved into the window of a Jewish bagel and sandwich shop in Sydney weeks before it opened, sparking a police investigation.
Police received a report of malicious damage at Lox in a Box on Oxford Street, Paddington, at around 12pm on Thursday.
A spokesman said investigations found the incident occurred on Saturday, March 21. The storefronts were covered with brown paper after being painted, and business owner Candy Berger said she didn’t discover the Nazi symbol until she removed the covering earlier this week.
“Today we wanted to cover it all up again,” he wrote in an Instagram post.
“I stood there in shock and thought about what this symbol represented. What it meant to my people… I am the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, and today it felt like a punch that went deeper than most.”
Lox in a Box was founded in Bondi and has sites in Coogee and Marrickville. The business was painting and renovating its Paddington site ahead of its opening on April 9.
The engraving is the latest in a series of alleged anti-Semitic incidents in Sydney’s east following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s war in Gaza.
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Before the terrorist attack that killed 15 people at the Chanukah event on Bondi beach in December, cars were set on fire and houses were destroyed in the area where many Australian Jews live.
Another popular Jewish bakery in Surry Hills, Avner’s, closed permanently after the terrorist attack, with a message displayed in the store’s window saying it could no longer ensure the safety of its employees and customers.
“After the pogrom in Bondi, one thing has become clear: it is no longer possible to visibly, publicly, proudly secure Jewish sites and events in Australia,” the message said.
Celebrity chef Ed Halmagyi, who runs the bakery, said the business had faced “almost constant anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and intimidation” for two years.
Lox in a Box closed its Bondi, Coogee and Marrickville stores the day after the Bondi attack. Berger said at the time that the business was bombarded with one-star reviews in the following days, accusing critics of antisemitism.
“This is what I woke up to in my inbox,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
“This is so disheartening, where is our collective humanity? Antisemitism is no joke… Posting negative antisemitic reviews can really hurt a small business like ours.”
Following Saturday’s alleged vandalism, Berger praised the efforts of police and the Community Safety Group, a Jewish organization. He suggested that the timing was “calculated just as the Jewish people were preparing for Passover, which we remember was marked before.”
“We won’t let this break us,” he wrote on Instagram. “We will not let it close our doors or dim the light of something we have worked so hard to build.”
