Vandalism at Hanukkah-themed homes on Hampden’s ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ roils festive tradition for Jewish residents

Rabbi Moshe Moskowitz, a new resident on Hampden’s “Miracle on 34th Street,” has been trying to sit on his porch each night since Saturday, when he and another Jewish neighbor had fruit strewn about their lawns and lights tampered with.

Part of it is to greet the onlookers to the annual spectacle on the 700 block of 34th Street, where homes are extravagantly decorated with festive holiday decor. But part of him is just being cautious.

Baltimore Police are investigating Saturday’s incident, where Moskowitz came home to his neighbors cleaning up smashed watermelon from his lawn, as a hate crime.

“Unfortunately, most Jews have had experience with antisemitism,” said Moskowitz, who works for an on-campus service for the Johns Hopkins University’s Jewish community. No major developments have happened since Saturday, though neighbors and public officials have offered him support, he said.

The vandalism was targeted at the only two houses on the block with Jewish imagery.  Moskowitz’s home is lightly decorated with string lights and has a sign in the yard that says “We stand with Israel.” The other home does not make a direct statement on the Jewish state but is adorned for Hanukkah with dreidels, menorahs and white bears wearing yarmulkes and tallits, the fringed garments worn by religious Jews as prayer shawls.

That house also being targeted “hammers home that this wasn’t about some sort of twisted understanding of anti-Zionism,” the opposition to the modern state of Israel, but rather that the vandalism was targeted at the block’s Jewish residents, Moskowitz said.

Watermelons were adopted as a symbol for Palestinians to circumvent censorship laws adopted by the Israeli government following the 1967 Six-Day War and ensuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When cut open, the fruit shows the red, green, black and white of the state’s flag.

Domestic tensions over the war have boiled over since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took over 200 hostages. In retaliation and to try to eliminate the terrorist group, Israel has waged a ground offensive and hit the Gaza Strip with thousands of airstrikes, destroying neighborhoods and displacing millions of Palestinians in Gaza, over 20,000 of whom have died, according to The Associated Press. Around a quarter of Gaza’s over 2 million residents are starving, the United Nations and other agencies said in a report last week.

Moskowitz, who moved to Baltimore with his family in August, has no problem saying that innocent Palestinians shouldn’t be dying in the name of the war, but domestic divisions have become frightening — antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents have both risen nationally. A woman displaying the Palestinian flag at her home nearby had her home vandalized, he added, noting that he can relate to the fear something like that can instill. Last month, a Johns Hopkins physician was placed on leave after making a series of violent tweets about Palestinians.

“Almost always, the loudest voices in the room aren’t worth listening to,” he said, noting “difficult conversations” were necessary for the complex issue in the Middle East and unproductive actions, like the one on his street, have instead focused on frightening others.  “It’s very upsetting that something like this has occurred on a block that brings so much joy to residents across the city,” Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who visited the families in Hampden, said in a statement. “Antisemitism is unacceptable here, in my district, and in our city.”

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “very troubled” by the news of “seemingly targeted acts of vandalism.”

“Antisemitism in every form must be denounced unequivocally,” he said.

In another post on X, Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer said the vandalism was “a consequence of leaders failing to condemn antisemitism,” apparently referring to the City Council rejecting his resolution condemning the Oct. 7 attacks. The four members who blocked the Dec. 4 measure from passing later said they abstained because the resolution “did not acknowledge the millions of Palestinians and individuals from the Islamic faith who are impacted by indiscriminate violence and oppression.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Dillon Mullan contributed to this article.