Neighbors find spike in antisemitic flyers around Triangle 'disturbing'
The Triangle is seeing a surge of antisemitic flyers landing in front yards of neighborhoods.
In the last seven days, families in Clayton, Cary, Raleigh and Durham have discovered hateful and inflammatory messages against the Jewish community.
The president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Raleigh said it is startling to see these flyers in neighborhoods that are not far from two synagogues in the city.
Some feel these instances are brought on by Monday being Holocaust Remembrance Day and Thursday being Adolf Hitler's birthday.
One neighbor shared a pile of them with WRAL News. She walked around collecting them Friday morning so her neighbors wouldn't have to see the hateful messages inside.
Plastic sandwich bags weighed down by beans littered the sidewalks and streets of a north Raleigh neighborhood. A neighbor provided security video of someone throwing the bags from a car.
Hannah McWilliams discovered one in her driveway. She said finding it was "disturbing."
"I have a daughter and I know there’s a lot of kids in this neighborhood," McWilliams said. "It definitely worries me and makes me sad that someone would do something like that."
Antisemitic flyers fill plastic bags that were dropped off Thursday in broad daylight along Longstreet, Mockingbird, and Summerglen Drives.
Similar flyers have been found in neighborhoods in Johnston County, Cary and Durham.
Rabbi Lucy Dinner of Temple Beth-Or in Raleigh has seen flyers like these in the past.
"I think they are very typical antisemitic canards," Dinner said. "They are dog whistles to first blame the Jews."
The Anti-Defamation League tracks incidents of antisemitism. 2022 set records for hate targeting the Jewish community with nearly 3,700 incidents nationwide. That's up 36 percent from the year before. The ADL counted 39 incidents of antisemitism in North Carolina in 2022. That was a 30 percent increase from 2021.
"What I believe gives us strength on this time in history is that I believe there are so many voices and so many in the majority who want to tamp down the hate," Dinner said.
Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said a person caught distributing these could be charged with ethnic intimidation if the flier contains a threat.
That's a Class 1 misdemeanor, meaning someone convicted of that crime could face up to 120 days in jail.
