This Hate Crime Will End With a Twist : Anti-Semitism: Vandalism of a yeshiva will unite, not separate, Jews and Christians.

When Jewish institutions are defaced with swastikas and other symbols that we associate with hate crimes, certain public responses are predictable. Political leaders deplore the villains. Jewish defense organizations call for increased community vigilance and trot out statistics that reflect a rise in anti-Jewish incidents. News media report the story and publish editorial denunciations.

But there is another component to the response: the resolve of a broad-based community of people who rise to adversity and confront hate by coming together to rebuild. Although this is the least political response to the crimes of hate, it may be the most powerful one. If the haters have sprayed their swastikas to send a community into hiding, their failure is manifest when that community emerges both stronger and bolder, and with unprecedented bonds to other religious communities. The attackers’ dreams of divisive intolerance are confounded.

Valley Torah High School of North Hollywood was attacked by anti-Jewish vandals last Friday night. The goons spray-painted huge swastikas on the school’s corridor walls. They wrote “KKK” on furniture and fixtures. In some rooms they painted the word Jew and superimposed swastikas--drawn backward, at that--over that one syllable that troubles them so.

In my mind’s eye, I envision those thugs on the morrow of their hate crime. I see them buying The Times and searching its pages for confirmation that they have stirred a Jewish community into a tizzy. They locate the report of their vandalism on the Metro / Valley section’s front page. “Private Jewish High School Vandalized, Burglarized,” the headline alarums. A photographer has caught the yeshiva’s principal, Rabbi Avrohom Stulberger, surveying the damage. A bronze memorial tablet is in disarray, the names of Holocaust victims once again disturbed.

They read Rabbi Stulberger’s reaction: “It’s a horrible, frightening thing. I cannot believe what these animals have done. We’re a small, private high school that isn’t in the limelight, isn’t in the headlines. All we do here is teach.” They imagine that they have struck a fierce blow. Perhaps they laugh. Hitler lives once more.

The newspaper will not follow up on the yeshiva’s story much in the coming weeks. Other stories will take its place. A campaign will be launched to fight drug abuse somewhere, to house the homeless, to provide health care for the uninsured, to pump up the lottery. Presumably, the yeshiva will be forgotten.

Not so. The yeshiva will be inundated with offers of help and support. Protestant ministers and Catholic priests may call, and Reform and Conservative Jewish temples will extend a hand to an Orthodox Jewish institution that some of them would otherwise ignore. For Jews of all denominations, swastikas are swastikas.

A computer manufacturer or dealer will read that the thugs stole a computer. He may be Jewish, or he may just as possibly be Christian. He will call and offer to replace the computer. He may even offer a second computer, or he may just upgrade the yeshiva’s entire system.

The rabbi will meet with his board of directors and launch a fund drive to repair the damage. And everyone in the community at large will contribute. The yeshiva’s annual fund-raising banquet will be the most successful ever. “Everyone” will be there--maybe even the mayor. Because swastikas are swastikas.

Soon, the publicity will generate greater community awareness of the remarkable work that the small North Hollywood yeshiva does. People will learn of a high school that educates immigrants from South America, Iran, Israel and the former Soviet Union, integrating them into American society, educating them successfully alongside the school’s mainstream student body of American Jewish teen-agers. Many will be amazed that so small a school, on so restricted a budget, even sends some of its graduates on to UCLA and the Ivy League.

Eventually, the yeshiva will grow and expand. Life will go on. The yeshiva that does not make headlines will keep contributing its small portion to America’s quilt-work. And the hate-filled troglodytes who painted the backward swastikas--older, if not wiser--will pass by the yeshiva one day and wonder: How did that place grow so big? They will hardly see the answer in their reflections. But there it will be.