Jewish community fearful after Swastikas appear in playground

Swastikas have appeared in a playground in the Stamford Hill district of North London, raising alarm in an area that's home to Britain's largest Orthodox Jewish community.

"There's a sense of anxiety and fear amongst local parents," Shulem Stern from the Jewish neighbourhood watch group Shomrim said after the Nazi symbols were discovered for the fourth day in a row.

"The playground is next to a Jewish Care home where many elderly Jewish residents live, some of them Holocaust survivors," he told the Jewish Chronicle.

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The vice president of the group's board, Marie van der Zyl, said putting symbols of religious hate in areas where Jewish children play "is an act of racism intended to spread fear and alarm."

She added: "In a week when [we have] given evidence at the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into the rise of anti-Semitism, this is an example of one of the many threats the Jewish community faces."

Police figures released in December reveal that anti-Jewish hate crimes, which include verbal abuse and criminal damage, had almost doubled in the Hackney borough during the previous year.

"It demonstrates the depth and persistence of this grave problem, which needs to be urgently and properly dealt with," Shomrim president Rabbi Herschel Gluck told the Evening Standard.