COBB COUNTY, Ga. — As anti-Semitic slurs and imagery pop up in two Cobb County schools within one week, Georgia's first Jewish senator is speaking out against the hate.
While speaking at a Yom Kippur service at Temple Emanu-El in Sandy Springs, Senator Jon Ossoff denounced the discriminatory attacks.
"Yom Kippur being a day for reflection, and reckoning, and atonement, and recommitment, it's fitting to take stock today of the threats to pluralism, to tolerance, to democracy, to peaceful coexistence in our society and around the world," Ossoff said.
Students and parents found out about hateful vandalism discovered inside two bathrooms at Lassiter High School in Marietta on Wednesday, which was the beginning of Yom Kippur and holiest day of the year in Judaism.
Just days prior, similar anti-Semitic graffiti was spotted at neighboring school Pope High.
"My generation was raised with the words, never forget, pressed into our minds," Ossoff said.
Ossoff recollected on the moment he traced numbers that were tattooed into his cousin's arm at a concentration camp in Estonia, and urged the room to remember the horrors of the Holocaust.
"And so when at Pope High School in Marietta, Georgia, a swastika and a tribute to Adolf Hitler are scrawled on school walls — during Yamim Noraim, our days of awe, no less, it must inflame in us the same passion for the survival of our people that burned in the hearts of the generation that emerged from the Shoah, and built a future for the Jewish people here in America, around the world, and in the land of Israel,” Ossoff said.
Lassiter High's principal said in a statement to parents there is an active investigation into the incident.
A district spokesperson at Pope High also issued a statement regarding disciplinary actions and the defacement found at the school:
"Anytime students misbehave, and in this case disrespect, individual students, people groups, and their school, we find it unacceptable. The principal has engaged with community groups who have been affected by this student behavior, and all applicable District policy and law will be applied."
Read the full statement from Pope High here.