Reversing course, Philadelphia Jewish museum to rehang vandalized Israeli flag

JTA — The Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia announced Thursday that it will return an Israeli flag to its facade after two consecutive weeks of vandalism.

The flag, which hangs on an exterior wall of the US Jewish museum with the words “The Weitzman stands with Israel,” was vandalized with red spray paint early Monday morning. It has already been cleaned following a similar incident on August 18.

After the second incident, the museum announced that it was “expediting” plans to swap the flag for a “hostage-focused sign” that had been planned to go up closer to the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The move swiftly drew criticism, especially after The Forward ran a story with the headline “Philadelphia Jewish museum won’t rehang Israeli flag now after it was vandalized twice in a week.”

In the comments of an Instagram post by the Weitzman museum announcing the signage swap, one user wrote, “They will see removing the Israeli flag as a victory, even for a message about the hostages.” Another commenter wrote, “Removing the Israeli flag will not save the museum from more attacks.”

On Thursday, the museum reversed course, saying its planned change had been mischaracterized.

“What we certainly did not intend with this plan was to create a perception that we were capitulating to vandals or had somehow walked back our position of unequivocal support for Israel and its people,” the museum’s president and CEO, Dan Tadmor, said in a statement.

“Yet that’s how it was perceived by some. And perception — as we all know, especially in today’s day and age — is reality,” Tadmor continued. “And perception does matter. As the nation’s Jewish museum, there can never be any misunderstanding as to our identity and positions: we are a proudly Jewish and proudly Zionist institution.”

Both the hostage sign and the Israeli flag will be installed sometime over the next week, according to Tadmor.

In June, the federal government arrested a Maryland man accused of sending threatening letters to the Weitzman that referenced the museum’s “many big open windows,” “Kristallnacht,” “anger and rage” and a future need to “rebuild” the institution following its destruction.

The incidents come amid a string of vandalism at Jewish museums across the country. Last month, several swastikas were painted on the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, and in June at a Jewish art museum in Manhattan, a man wrote the word “Gaza.”

Last summer, a sculpture outside of the Brooklyn Museum in New York was tagged with a host of pro-Palestinian phrases, including “Ur museum kills kids in Palestine!” and “F–-k Israel.”

Israeli flags have also drawn vandalism. This week, when the school board in Beverly Hills, California, voted to install Israeli flags in the district’s schools, one board member warned that the move could turn the schools into targets.