A New York man has been arrested after he was seen drawing a swastika in the snow outside a Jewish temple in video footage, and returned to the site.
Authorities said the suspect, Manuel Barrera, was apprehended on Thursday as he attempted a second antisemitic act against the Emanu-El temple on the city’s Upper East Side.
He has since been charged with antisemitic aggravated harassment, NBC News reported.
Officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested the 50 year-old, of Harlem, following a call from the temple on Thursday.
That came as the suspect, Mr Barrera, returned to the site to draw another swastika and other antisemitic symbols.
In the first incident, the suspect was seen in CCTV footage walking up to the temple in February, before turning around and drawing a swastika in the snow.
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NYPD’s task force for hate crime called for information on the suspect, and wrote on Twitter at the time that a man was “wanted for Anti Semitic Aggravated Harassment”.
According to NBC News, Mr Barrera on Thursday attempted to draw a swastika, as well as a pentagram and the figures "666," which are known as satanic symbols.
The swastika has served as a symbol of antisemitism since 1945 and it’s use by Nazi regime, who were estimated to have killed as many as six million Jewish people in the Holocaust.
The latest hate crime figures from the FBI, released in 2019, revealed a 14 per cent rise in the number of antisemitic crimes on the previous year, while Jewish people were the targets of more than 60 pr cent of all religious hate crimes.
Temple Emanu-El, now a Reform Judaism congregation, was established in 1845 and has been based at the Fifth Avenue location since 1927, when work on the temple begun.
It was believed to be the largest synagogue in the world upon completion, and according to NBC News, can fit more people than the St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown.
