Photo of the swastika found carved in snow at Mount Allison University. Photo: Twitter.

Jewish students at Mount Allison University in Canada said they were “brought back to reality” by the sight of a giant swastika etched in the snow on the campus football field on Friday night, the network CBC News reported.

Laura Medicoff, head of the school’s Jewish Students Association, told CBC that she assumed attending a small school of 2,500 students would mean she wouldn’t have to confront open Jew-hatred, but “this is something that does exist and I do have to be concerned about it.”

Another student, Caroline Kovesi, said that she won’t be telling her grandparents about the incident. “It’s such a disgrace to all of my family members who were murdered in the Holocaust,” she said.

Mount Allison professor Tasia Alexopoulos said that students are most upset by the fact that the carving of the swastika is not an isolated hate-related episode at the school. “They are speaking about their experiences with racism on campus in all of its forms and they are saying, ‘This is another example that we can add to the pile and it’s becoming a very large pile.'”

A university spokesman said the swastika was eliminated on Saturday morning and turned into the word “hope.” Mount Allison officials said they are taking the matter “very seriously” and are conducting an investigation.

As The Algemeiner reported early this month, some of 2016’s most egregious antisemitic incidents took place on Canadian campuses. Four of the country’s universities appeared on The Algemeiner‘s first annual list of “40 worst colleges for Jewish students.”