On Thursday, 27-year-old Jaifeng Chen was arrested in Arizona after he allegedly spray-painted swastikas and hate speech on Hanukkah decorations, the wall outside of the Chabad of Kalamazoo, and the Kalamazoo Valley Arcadia Commons Campus in Michigan.
According to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety, Chen is a Chinese national with no significant ties to the Kalamazoo area.
They also said that the FBI worked in coordination with other law enforcement agencies in Arizona to locate and ultimately arrest the Chinese national. Chen is now in federal custody.
"He was difficult to identify for us because he had no real ties to Kalamazoo," said Kalamazoo Public Safety Chief Dave Boysen. "He’d only been here for about a month. He’s kind of been all over the country."
"They're not going to push us away...if anything, they're going to make us stronger," he said.
Officers said they "don't know what his motivation was" in the act, but that he is also accused of spray painting other racist graffiti around Kalamazoo Valley Community College's Arcadia Commons campus. The vandalism occurred on the night of Nov. 17, and the community immediately worked together to clean up the antisemitic symbols the following morning.
Rabbi Haller told the outlet, "We do good and positive things, and in the long run, the light prevails."
Haller's wife, Dobroshe, said, "Thank you for the outpouring of love and support." She added, "We will try to remove the graffiti and pray together for our brothers and sisters in the holy land and peace everywhere, including here and Kalamazoo."Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists, antisemitism has been on the rise in the United States. Jewish students at Cornell have received death threats, Jewish students at New York City's Cooper Union were forced to hide inside lockers from an angry mob, and an Israeli student was physically and verbally assaulted at Harvard, among other instances.
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