Vandals Deface Holocaust Memorial at UC Irvine

Police at UC Irvine on Wednesday were looking for vandals who defaced a campus Holocaust memorial as students and school officials expressed outrage over what they call an act of hate.

In honor of Holocaust remembrance week, students at UCI built a sprawling memorial in Aldrich Park at the center of campus Sunday night. The nearly 10,000-square-foot display included signs on wooden stakes planted in the ground and mock tombstones ringed by barbed wire to symbolize Nazi concentration camps.

About 9:30 p.m. Monday several members of the Hillel Jewish Student Union, who created the display, found about a third of the stakes pulled from the ground and the barbed wire thrown aside.

No anti-Semitic messages were left to indicate the motives of whoever disturbed the memorial. Investigators have not characterized the incident as a hate crime because no laws were broken.

But bigotry is believed to be a motivating factor, said UCI Police Chief Al Brown. “We don’t view this as a prank,” he said.

Campus police would like to identify the culprits to prevent future incidents and university officials may punish them for violating codes of conduct.

“I was furious,” said Seth Brown, 23, a social sciences major. “It was pure hatred. There is no other reason than hatred of Judaism.”

He said members had restored the display by 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. But the community’s feeling of violation will take longer to heal, he said.

“We’ve felt targeted for a long time -- anything Jewish-related is targeted,” Brown said.

Spring is full of days of remembrances on the Jewish calendar, including Yom Hashoah, honoring those who died in the Holocaust.

The incident underscores the need for the memorial on the campus, said Jeffrey Rips, executive director of the Bendat Hillel Center in Costa Mesa: “We should forgive but we should never forget. It is important we remember.”