The San Diego skyline. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Police in San Diego, California are investigating a hate crime in which an Orthodox rabbi was verbally abused and assaulted by a young male, an ABC affiliated reported on Friday.

On Monday morning, Rabbi Aharon Shapiro, who works for a local Orthodox Union chapter, was shopping for sodas at a 7-Eleven near San Diego State University when someone asked if he was Jewish and then, he told KGTV, “without taking a breath…launched into a tirade against Israel, against the Jews.”

The man, Rabbi Shapiro continued, also said “all Jews should be dead, all Jews deserve to die” before snatching Shapiro’s tzitzits off his garment and running off.

“[The] alleged assault on a San Diego Rabbi that was accompanied by antisemitic slurs is reprehensible and another indicator of the hatred that exists toward the Jewish community,” the San Diego office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted after the incident. “We are grateful that San Diego Police are investigating this incident as a hate crime and call on local leaders to condemn this latest act of hate.”

Monday’s attack on Rabbi Shapiro is not the first antisemitic incident in San Diego in 2023. In May, an unidentified person used their own excrement to vandalize the walls of a University of California-San Diego (UCSD) residential bathroom with swastikas, while in March, a man toppled a decorative menorah mounted on the lawn of Chabad House at San Diego State University, the second time such an incident occurred in two years and third time overall that center had been vandalized.

California had the second most antisemitic incidents in the nation in 2022, according to an annual audit by the ADL, with 508, coming in only behind New York, where there were 518. In 2023, incidents on college campuses have raised concerns about the safety of students.

In April, back to back antisemitic acts occurred on and near the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). In the first, a group of students organized a party commemorating the birthday of Adolf Hitler, and in the second, someone placed a flyer promoting antisemitic and homophobic ideas on the windshield of a car parked in downtown Santa Cruz. At Stanford University, antisemitic incidents “keep happening,” Rabbi Jessica Kirschner told The Algemeiner in a statement in April after someone etched a swastika into a metal panel of a bathroom and a mezuzah was stolen from an undergraduate resident.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.