Southern California woman claims neighbor drew swastika on her groceries

A Jewish mother of two in West Hollywood says she’s devastated after her home’s doorbell camera captured a neighbor drawing what appears to be a swastika on groceries just outside her front door.

The violation, according to Leah Grossman, happened in early December and has left her feeling unsafe in her own home.

“Is there a problem?” Grossman can be heard asking her neighbor in the video footage.

“No,” he responds, telling her that he was just walking by.

“I saw you,” she tells him. “I have a camera. Like, what is that, what did you draw there?”

“I don’t know,” her neighbor says and walks away.

In the video, the neighbor can be seen in front of Grossman’s door, pulling a pen out of his pocket and drawing something on the box of seltzer water.

“He kind of looks around then gets his little pen out of his pocket and draws his little swastika,” she said of the incident.

The West Hollywood mother of two who said she’s still in shock about the interaction and confronted her neighbor about it.

“You can’t tell me what that shape is,” she’s seen asking him in the video.

“No,” he says.

“I have it on camera,” she says. “I mean, I know you did it. I don’t know why you’d lie about it.”

Grossman believes the alleged antisemitism was sparked after she put up an Israeli flag and claims her neighbor called her a fascist for it.

KTLA reached out to the neighbor about the drawing, which Grossman said he later referred to as a symbol of peace, but he did not answer his door.

“The story he will tell you now is that it’s a Manji and that it’s an ancient Buddhist symbol for peace,” she told KTLA.

While in the west, the swastika is a symbol of hate, the millennia-old symbol is sacred in Hinduism and represents the mark of wellbeing. In Buddhism it signifies the Buddha’s footsteps, according to reporting by the Associated Press.

Grossman said her neighbor told her that he was only trying to educate her about history and even offered an apology that she says is not worth accepting.

“I know in my heart of hearts that it’s completely self-serving, has nothing to do with any kind of contrition as far as what was done to me, what was done to my children,” she said.

A police report about the incident was filed, but Grossman admitted that proving this was a hate crime would be difficult.

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