A playground labyrinth meant to encourage quiet introspection for elementary school students was defaced with antisemitic graffiti in San Francisco last week.
The San Francisco Police Department said it is investigating the incident, which occurred at Commodore Sloat Elementary School on the corner of Ocean Avenue and Junipero Serra Boulevard. Police couldn’t specify when the graffiti was first spotted, only that it “was seen sometime between July 28-July 31,” Officer Robert Rueca said in an email to J. on Wednesday.
A photo that was posted to Nextdoor shows antisemitic graffiti in the center of the playground labyrinth at Commodore Sloat Elementary School in San Francisco.
“We walked around the school and found things everywhere,” said Cristine Egami, a parent who learned about the graffiti from friends over the weekend and went to the school Sunday to help clean it up.
She was told that her friend and her friend’s third-grader were some of the first to witness the hateful markings. They tried to scrub them away “with gravel and water,” Egami said, but that didn’t work, so Egami and her partner went to a nearby store, bought graffiti removal chemicals and removed the tags themselves.
Swastikas and illegible writing littered the playground — there were about 20 or more tags, Egami said. She was particularly disturbed to find a clearly written message in the middle of the playground’s distinctive “sun labyrinth,” a walkable maze with a large yellow sun in the center.
The message said “f— Jews,” next to a Star of David with an “X” through it.
“It was this big horrible message in the middle of the sun,” said Egami, a mother of three with a third-grader at Sloat. “It’s where our school has a morning circle before school even starts. We meet up and have announcements and do some fun activities.”
Egami, a member of a summertime parent committee responsible for watering the trees in the yard, said she saw “at least nine different things on the lower yard, on the play structure,” tags on all of the mini basketball hoops and tags on the Little Free Library book exchange, including on one of the books inside the structure. There were also swastikas on the inside of the tunnel slide.
The incident happened less than three weeks before the new school year starts Aug. 16. Sloat Elementary, which has about 400 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, is part of the San Francisco Unified School District.
Sloat Principal Fowzigiah Abdolcader did not immediately respond to an email from J.