Swastika graffiti found in Witherspoon

Several whiteboards in the building also contained inappropriate pictures and messages, and some bathroom doors had been defaced with markers, public safety investigator Alvan Flanders said in an e-mail.

Two student-age males not affiliated with the University students were also reported to have been in the area around the time the graffiti was discovered early Thursday morning.

At about 1:30 a.m., two males knocked on Witherspoon RCA Maria Salciccioli ’09’s door, having been let into the building on false pretenses.

“They made up a story about how they were locked out and [that] one guy’s girlfriend had cheated on him and they had to find her, and someone let them in,” said Salciccioli, who is also a blogger for The Daily Princetonian. The men eventually left the building.

Salciccioli said she found a paper towel dropped in front of her room that looked like it had been used to erase a whiteboard, and her own whiteboard had been erased.

“It was really scary for me and for the people in the building, and I think that while it was really offensive, I’m just glad nothing worse happened. It’s an important lesson to be more cautious,” Salciccioli said of the incident.

Leaders of the Jewish community on campus emphasized the need to move past events of this nature.

“Is it hate crime? Yes, I suppose so. What do we do about it? We continue to teach, we continue to discuss, and we continue to debate, because that is who we are as Americans, as Princetonians,” Chabad chaplain Rabbi Eitan Webb said.

The event was especially disturbing for some, coming so soon after the terrorist attacks last week that targeted a Chabad house and several other sites in Mumbai, India, and resulted in the deaths of the house’s Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

“I was saddened and surprised to hear about such an act of anti-Semitism on campus,” Center for Jewish Life president Cara Singer ’09 said in an e-mail. “The use of a symbol infused with such violent and hateful associations is particularly upsetting in the wake of last week’s events in Mumbai.”

“We also have to realize that whoever is doing this realizes that it’s not ok … or if they think it’s ok, they think that most of the world doesn’t think it’s ok, and they can’t get away with it,” Webb noted.

“That shows that here at least in America, people have their heads on right, and that means I think we’re going in the right direction,” he added.

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This event comes in the wake of several other bias incidents on campus in the past two years, including an anti-gay slur found on a bathroom stall in Holder Hall last spring and an anti-Semitic chalkboard drawing found in Bloomberg Hall in spring 2007.

After the Bloomberg incident, campus groups, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students and the residential colleges posted anti-bias flyers around the campus.