Vandals painted seven large red swastikas on the windows and outside walls of a photography shop owned by Russian Jewish immigrants in Columbia's Harper's Choice Village Center early yesterday or late Sunday -- the third time the store has been attacked since it opened in September.
The co-owners of Uniphoto Labs Inc. -- Solomon Keyser and Yakov Fox, Columbia residents from Odessa, Ukraine -- were disturbed by the incident but focused more on their future.
"We don't have time to be angry. We have to decide what to do with our business," said Mr. Keyser, adding that they are considering moving to another location.
The graffiti, reported to police at 8:40 a.m. yesterday, represented the second hate-bias crime reported to county police this year, said Sgt. Steven Keller, a police spokesman. The other incident this year involved racist graffiti in a bathroom. Police received reports of 65 hate-bias crimes in 1994, he said.
The photography shop's co-owners say they have no specific idea why their store has been vandalized three times in six months but now believe they've been targeted for harassment. The two incidents last fall involved a broken window and the painting of another red swastika, an ancient symbol adopted by Nazi Germany and considered offensive to Jews.
"These are like warning signs -- be careful once, then the next and the next," Mr. Fox said. "It means something for us."
The attack on the photo shop was the sixth anti-Semitic incident in Columbia in the last four months, said Michael Jacobs, a spokesman for the Jewish Federation of Howard County. The prior incidents all involved swastikas and Nazi slogans.
"The real lesson from this type of incident is that Columbia and Howard County are not immune to this virus of hate," he said. "We need to be aware of that, and be able to respond and deal with it."
But Arthur Abramson, the executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council, said that there have been few, if any, hate crimes against Russian immigrants in the Baltimore metropolitan area in recent years.
"There has been some anti-Semitic activity, such as in Annapolis with the Ku Klux Klan, but thankfully it has been relatively little in terms of incidents," he said. "This is the first time I've heard of specific incidents against Russian immigrants. That suggests to that there is probably a personal reason for it, although you can never know for sure."
Pat Hatch, director of Columbia's Foreign-Born Information Referral Network Inc., also said this is the first time she's heard of Russian Jewish immigrants being harassed in the county. "We have a fairly warm community for newcomers," she said. "I haven't heard about this type of thing happening before in Howard County."
The incident is just the latest problem at the Harper's Choice Village Center, off Harper's Farm Road in Columbia's second-oldest village.
Community activists have been working with Columbia Management Inc. -- the Rouse Co. subsidiary that manages the center -- to try to fill vacant storefronts, improve maintenance, and increase lighting and security at the center.
At a community meeting two weeks ago, one resident complained that properties in the Harper's Choice area had fallen into such disrepair that the village was "beginning to look like a slum," a description seldom applied to Columbia's largely middle-class environs.
Another public meeting, previously scheduled by the Harper's Choice Village Board, will be held at 7:30 tonight to discuss potential solutions to problems at the village center. The meeting at Kahler Hall will include village board members and Columbia Management representatives.
"Management is supposed to take care of this," Mr. Fox said. "If they can't prevent violence, we have to move."
At the Rouse Co., Jody Clark, a vice president, decried the vandalism: "This is an awful situation. It's terrible to have these types of incidents occur. As the police investigate, depending on what they find, we will do what we can to prevent this from happening again."
An increased number of security patrols in the past five months already has decreased crime at the village center, Ms. Clark said. Work to improve lighting at the center likely will begin in the spring.
Howard County's Office of Human Rights also will be offering support to Uniphoto's owners as well as working with the community to try to prevent future incidents, Administrator James E. Henson Sr. said yesterday. The office's Network of Neighbors -- a 100-member group of volunteers who provide support to victims of hate-bias crimes -- will contact the store owners.
As Columbia Management maintenance workers yesterday morning cleaned the swastikas off the photography shop's windows, a passer-by reacted even more angrily to the incident than the shop's owners.
"I am personally appalled because I live in the community," Harper's Choice resident Mary Jane Mulligan said. "It hurts me, angers me and makes me feel uncomfortable that something like this happens in the community I live in. This is something that affects all of us. It's frightening."
Ms. Mulligan entered Uniphoto to tell its owners that she found the vandalism "repulsive and insulting" and not representative of the community. To which Mr. Keyser replied: "I left the former Soviet Union to eliminate something like this. I left communism and fascism."
Wendy Tzuker, Harper's Choice village manager, also said she was "appalled that this type of incident would happen in a community whose strength is its diversity. That's why so many of us moved here -- for a culturally diverse and free society."
Last fall, when a window was broken at Uniphoto, the shop's owners first believed it was a prank. Then around Thanksgiving, a swastika was painted on a window along with several expletives, they said.
Mr. Fox, who immigrated in 1988 and recently became a U.S. citizen, drove a cab in Rockville before going into the photo business. He learned English on the job, and by reading newspapers and listening to the radio.
Mr. Keyser, who also knew no English when he came here in 1990, plans to apply for citizenship this year. He has degrees from Russian universities in photography and business, and was a vice president of a government-run photo company in the Ukraine.
The two were friends in Odessa, but met in the United States only by coincidence, Mr. Keyser said. One reason he immigrated, Mr. Keyser said, was to enjoy the freedom of religion the United States offered.