Screenshot of surveillance footage showing accused antisemitic vandal Lenny De La Rosa. Photo: NYPD Crime Stoppers/Twitter

Police in New York have arrested a 21-year-old man who allegedly daubed a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with antisemitic graffiti.

Lenny De La Rosa was taken into custody on Wednesday and charged with a hate crime. He is accused of having defaced the electronic message board on display outside the Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun Synagogue with an antisemitic message.

According to the police, De La Rosa used a marker pen to scrawl his message before fleeing along East 85th Street, where the synagogue is located. The message was quickly erased and no permanent damage to the message board was reported.

It is not yet clear whether De La Rosa is the same individual who targeted other Jewish community facilities two days after the vandalism at Kehilath Jeshurun. An individual matching his description was reported to have attempted to forcibly enter Temple Shaaray Tefila, another synagogue on the Upper East Side, before defacing it with antisemitic graffiti. The same man also went to an ambulance zone of Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service, and confronted a worker there. Multiple vehicles were also defaced with graffiti, including one with the words “Drop Dead.”

“Right now, we don’t know necessarily if there is any threat associated with this individual, but his actions reflect the rising tide of antisemitic incidents nationwide,” Mitchell Silber — executive director of the Community Security Initiative, a nonprofit that provides security to synagogues and Jewish organizations across New York City — told The Algemeiner following the incident at Kehilath Jeshurun. “It’s tough to figure out what this is connected to. Is this a one-off individual with some grievances? We don’t really know enough to say. Conclusions will come when we know more, but it is certainly unnerving to people in the community.”