No excuse for teen’s anti-Semetic attack on synagogue
WILKES-BARRE — Nothing could explain away the hate.
No childhood bruised by abuse or school days spent feeling like the “outcast of the outcasts” could account for the swastikas and the slurs.
No psychiatric disorder or suicide attempt, no fantasy or delusion could justify the anti-Semitic graffiti Nora Rynkiewicz, 19, spread across the front of the Congregation Ohav Zedek synagogue on South Franklin Street in March.
“Each and every act that you committed was done out of your own free will,” Luzerne County Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. told Rynkiewicz on Monday, before sentencing her to nine months to 18 months in prison. “You know the difference between right and wrong. I don’t have to tell you. You knew what you were about to do was wrong.”
Rynkiewicz pleaded guilty in October to charges of institutional vandalism of a place of worship and criminal mischief, both third-degree felonies, and ethnic intimidation, a second-degree misdemeanor.
Rynkiewicz explained her version of the vandalism attack to an investigator during an interview for a pre-sentencing investigation, conducted after she pleaded guilty.
“Believing in National Socialism (Nazism), I suggested to my friend we show the Jews they haven’t defeated us,” Rynkiewicz told the investigator.
Rynkiewicz’s sympathy for Nazis and view of Adolf Hitler as a hero evolved from a series of fantasy lifestyles that began when she was in the eighth grade, around the time her father threatened to kill her mother, Dr. Alan Tepper, a forensic psychologist, said.
In ninth grade, Rynkiewicz worshipped Harry Potter, the fictional wizard from the popular series of books and movies. “She wanted to start her own quidditch team in Kirby Park,” her mother, also named Nora, said, referring to the magical sport played by Potter.
“She had a long history of these obsessions,” Mrs. Rynkiewicz said.
By 11th grade, Rynkiewicz’s interests had shifted to Ivan the Terrible and Russian history. In 12th grade, she became obsessed with Hitler, Mrs. Rynkiewicz said.
Danielle Pisarz, a classmate of Rynkiewicz’s at Wyoming Valley West, said Rynkiewicz would defend Hitler and the Nazis during informal class debates and ridicule Jewish students with the haughty hallway greeting, “Jews.”
“People still hate people for illogical reasons,” Pisarz said. “This was 1939, not 2008.”
Rynkiewicz apologized after the recitation of her personal history and the reminder of how, as Mrs. Rynkiewicz said, “the filth that was written” on the synagogue brought “bad memories of what really was the darkest time in world history.”
“I don’t want to be that,” Rynkiewicz told Olszewski. “I don’t want to be crazy and violent. It hurts me what I did. I want to apologize to everybody.”
Olszewski sentenced Rynkiewicz to concurrent terms of nine months to 18 months for the two felony counts, followed by three years of probation for the ethnic intimidation charge.
Olszewski ordered Rynkiewicz to pay $8,500 in restitution to Congregation Ohav Zedek and an unspecified amount for the cost of prosecution. She must submit to periodic drug and alcohol evaluations and undergo anger management counseling and other psychiatric treatment, Olszewski said.
Rynkiewicz and a 17-year-old accomplice attacked the synagogue on March 29, prosecutors said, scrawling swastikas on a sign and one of the doors, painting a Star of David over the word “Juden,” a term Nazis used to identify Jewish people, on another door, and the word “abschaum,” which means scum in German.
Members of the congregation discovered the graffiti as they arrived for Saturday morning services.
“It disgusted everybody,” Rabbi Nachman Bruce, the leader of Congregation Ohav Zedek, said. “It was hurt. It was feeling that this should not be happening in our day and age.”
Rynkiewicz and the juvenile also sprayed graffiti, including the words, “Hitler was right,” on a warehouse on Conyngham Avenue in Wilkes-Barre.
Hundreds of area residents, Jews and non-Jews, gathered outside the synagogue days after the attack, unified in support of the congregation and defiant against hate, and watched as the graffiti was removed.
“This was not a crime against the Jewish community, this was a crime against the entire Wyoming Valley,” attorney Murray Ufberg, the chairman of the Greater Wilkes-Barre Jewish Federation, said. “We hope that this is just never repeated.”
