Three swastikas were found drawn on the pavement outside a Yale University student dormitory Sunday night, the latest in a series of swastikas that have appeared around the Connecticut campus.
As of Tuesday no one knew who drew the Nazi symbols in chalk outside the entrance to Durfee Hall on the Old Campus, according to student newspaper the Yale Daily News.
The swastika, which is at least 5,000 years old, once represented good luck but has been associated with anti-Semitism ever since it was adopted as the symbol for Nazi Germany to promote pride for the Aryan race, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"Something as hateful as swastikas on campus - it's not what Yale stands for, its values or its behaviors," Rabbi Leah Cohen, executive director of the university's Slifka Center, told the newspaper.
Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway expressed outrage over the incident and urged students to contact Yale Police if they have information about who drew the offensive symbols.
"I condemn this shameful defacement, perpetrated anonymously under cover of night," the dean wrote in a campus-wide email sent Monday, Yale Daily News reported. "There is no room for hate in this house."
Students tried to wash the swastikas away, but faint outlines of the images were still seen on Monday, Holloway said.
The incident comes a little more than a month after someone drew several swastikas on white boards inside the Ivy League school's Vanderbilt Hall, the newspaper reported. Officials at the time called the drawings "completely unacceptable."
Jewish students, however, refused to let the intimidation apparently intended by the symbols get to them. Other students gathered outside Durfee Hall to draw symbols of love and peace to show support for the 313-year-old university's Jewish community.
"I believe that everyone at Yale should feel safe and comfortable being who they are, and I will do everything I can to make other Jewish students at Yale feel at home," Rebecca Bakal, president of the campus' Hillel center for Jewish life, told the newspaper.
It was not immediately clear if campus police are investigating the latest drawings.
