Anti-Semitic Incidents on Rise, Group Reports : Racism: The county had 24 cases of vandalism and 26 of harassment, threats or assaults in 1994, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith says.

Orange County experienced more anti-Semitic incidents in 1994 than during any year since the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith began tracking such events in 1981, the watchdog organization reported Wednesday.

“There is a tolerance for intolerance that we’ve never witnessed before,” said Joyce Greenspan, director of the group’s regional office, which covers Orange County and Long Beach.

According to the league’s annual report released Wednesday, the number of incidents in Orange County rose from 41 in 1993 to 50 in 1994, statistics that seemed to mirror a national trend. The findings were part of an ADL nationwide survey reporting 2,066 incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism, harassment, threats and assaults around the country last year. In 1993, the number was 1,867.

“There is more of a sense of hatred,” Greenspan said. “As economies do more and more poorly, there seems to be a need to have somebody to blame. There is a lot of glorification of hate as part of the pop culture; the people doing this seem to be younger and younger.”

In Orange County the reported incidents included 24 cases of vandalism and 26 of harassment, threats or assaults, ranging from anti-Semitic flyers placed in lockers at Corona del Mar High School to an attack in which a cross was cut on a young man’s forehead in Irvine.

Other incidents included swastikas painted on the walls of Sowers Middle School in Huntington Beach, a rock thrown through the glass door of Jewish Family Service in Orange, an Aryan Nation catalogue left on a rack at Newport Beach Library and a UC Irvine professor making insensitive comments while discussing Tay-Sachs, a disease that attacks primarily Jews.

Although the incidents occurred countywide, according to the report, nearly half were clustered in Huntington Beach, Orange, Irvine and Laguna Hills.

At a press conference Wednesday at ADL’s Santa Ana office, league staffers announced a new educational project aimed at breaking down the ethnic barriers between Jews and other groups likely to be targeted by attackers.

Begun three years ago in Los Angeles, the project, called “Children of the Dream,” will sponsor a group of Ethiopian Jewish teen-agers on a tour of three ethnically diverse Santa Ana high schools beginning next month. Now residents of Israel, the visitors will spend two weeks telling fellow teen-agers their stories of being evacuated from their native land to avoid persecution. Then next fall, project planners said, four non-Jewish, non-white Santa Ana students will be selected for a reunion in Israel with the Ethiopian students, who are black.

“We want to dispel the myth that Jews come only in one color,” project chairwoman Sonia Adelman said. “We want to begin building bridges with the black, Asian and Latin American communities so that when one of them is targeted they needn’t stand alone.”