UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Just five days ago, members of the Chabad Israel Center gathered on the corner of East 93rd Street and Second Avenue to watch the carving and lighting of an impressive ice menorah, as firetrucks dropped parachutes filled with gelt to mark the first night of Hanukkah.
But three days later, around 10 p.m. Wednesday, Chabad Israel Rabbi Uriel Vigler returned to the same corner and found the professionally-carved, 5-foot-tall sculpture smashed into tiny pieces, with chunks of ice strewn across the sidewalk and spilling onto the street.
“At first, I assumed it must have melted,” Vigler wrote on Facebook.
“When I looked more closely, however, I realized it had not melted at all,” he continued. “Aside from the frigid weather we’ve had all week, which certainly would’ve kept the menorah intact, it had clearly been hacked to pieces—a deliberate and malicious act by someone who didn’t like our menorah and what it represented.”
