Yorktown, VA – Community members are outraged by a swastika drawn on a political poster of a town justice running for reelection this year.
Tuesday night town justice Ilan Gilbert was part of a political debate event at the Yorktown Stage, when he left pamphlets and posters outside the door along with the rest of the candidate’s election materials.
When he walked out the door after the debate to collect his stuff, he noticed the swastika was scribbled on the poster.
“I think it’s an outrage,” he said and added he was shaken up and upset. “I’m not naive and I know there are all sorts of individuals, but when it hits home, it’s outrageous.”
Gilbert’s 94-year-old father Harry is a WWII medic who helped liberate concentration camps during the war, he said. His father Harry enlisted in the army with a sense of urgency, as a Jew whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Poland.
“I have no idea where that act exists on the spectrum of what it could possibly mean,” Ilan Gilbert said. “Individuals might not have known the significance — that it’s a derogatory symbol.”
