Volunteers Brush Away Symbols of Hate at Vandalized School

Right after church services ended Sunday morning, Terry Smith raced down to North Hollywood from Westlake Village, traded his Sunday finery for a T-shirt and jeans, and put aside his Bible for a paintbrush--to help clean up a Jewish high school hit by anti-Semitic graffiti.

“I just paid somebody to paint my house last week,” the 42-year-old engineer said as he swabbed off-white paint onto storage cabinets. “This is a different motivation.”

A week after vandals scrawled swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti onto walls of Valley Torah High School in North Hollywood, Smith and dozens of other volunteers from throughout the Southland mounted a counterattack to obliterate the final traces of hate.

About 50 people from a passel of churches turned out for the cleanup, anxious to demonstrate solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters in the aftermath of a spate of hate crimes that have jarred the San Fernando Valley.

Frank Eiklor is president and founder of Shalom International, a Christian-based organization in Costa Mesa dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism. “A crisis has brought us together,” Eiklor told the school’s principal, Rabbi Avrohom Stulberger. “They wanted to isolate you with hate. This group has come to insulate you with love.”

The cleanup effort, Eiklor said, will broadcast the message that “Jesus didn’t come as a blue-eyed Aryan; he came as a Jew.”

Last weekend, the boys high school was broken into and defaced with Nazi and Ku Klux Klan symbols. The intruders did thousands of dollars in damage and stole a computer and typewriter.

The incident received wide attention, outraged community leaders and heralded a rapid succession of anti-Semitic hate crimes, including one at Cal State Northridge and another in Studio City, where a new home was spray-painted with more than three dozen swastikas.

Partly in response to the school break-in, Mayor Tom Bradley last week announced the formation of a coalition to address the problems of such ethnic and racial groups.

But Eiklor said he planned Sunday’s event because the public needs to join the fight, too.

“We’re neighbors saying, ‘Never again!’ ” Eiklor declared to a chorus of amens. “An attack on our Jewish neighbors is an attack on everyone.”

For Rick Crawford, 25, who journeyed up to North Hollywood from Anaheim with six other members of the Set Free Christian Fellowship, the point was well taken.

“We come out and support them because in the Bible it says: ‘He who blesses Israel shall be blessed,’ ” he said. “I believe in the Bible.”