A swastika on a sticky note posted on an NYU dorm-room door. Photo: Anastasiya Muravyeva/Facebook.

After discovering a swastika and “white pride” messages on the door of their New York University dorm, Jewish and gay students are shaken but feeling “strong and moving forward,” the head of the school’s leading Jewish organization told The Algemeiner on Monday.

Rabbi Yehuda Sarna — Skirball Executive Director of the NYU Bronfman Center Hillel — said the affected students, “as grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and heroes; as survivors of personal assaults of different kinds; or as members of the LGBTQ community,” are working to get past the incident.

Sarna added that NYU’s Jewish students are “grateful to the administration for its swift action” and thankful to the other religious communities at the school “who have stood by our side at this time.”

The incident was first publicized on Facebook by NYU student Anastasiya Muravyeva, who published a photo of the notes at her dorm, together with the message: “To whoever did this to my door today, joke or not, I am not laughing. My Jewish and homosexual roommates are not laughing. Nobody is laughing.”

Sarna said that the offending sticky notes — which also included the word “Trump” — indicate the need for a “second front of combating antisemitism, now not only on the radical Left but also on the radical Right.”

NYU spokesperson John Beckman condemned the “vile, racist” act, telling the campus newspaper, NYU Local, that the school is “shocked by…this kind of appalling behavior [which] has no place on our campus, and we will not tolerate abuse or intimidation of members of the University community.” 

According to Sarna, in addition to an investigation by the New York City police department — which is treating the case as one of “bias,” rather than a “hate crime,” the school is conducting its own inquiry into the incident.

As The Algemeiner reported, universities across the country have reported more than a dozen acts of similar vandalism since the presidential election earlier this month, mainly involving the scrawling of swastika graffiti, by members of the both the political Left and Right.