Pittsburgh police are investigating what one group called an antisemitic act after an Israeli flag was slashed in the city’s North Side — for the third time in two years.
Video footage from the 1500 block of Buena Vista Street in the city’s Mexican War Streets neighborhood caught a man with long hair get out of a white pickup around 7 p.m. Saturday, police said. He proceeded to slash and ruin the flag with a knife before leaving the area.
“We are deeply troubled by this antisemitic act,” Shawn Brokos, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s director of community security and a former FBI agent, told TribLive in a prepared statement. “We appreciate the swift response of local law enforcement and encourage anyone with information or security footage to come forward so the perpetrator can be held accountable.”
The latest incident, which Pittsburgh police called “criminal mischief” in an online statement, comes as reports of antisemitic acts continue to climb, both locally and nationwide, amid war in the Middle East.
A total of 312 antisemitic incidents — a single-year record for the region — were reported to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh in 2025, Brokos told TribLive.
In 2021, the total was 82, Brokos said.
In 2017, the year before 11 Jewish congregants were gunned down in Pittsburgh during an Oct. 27, 2018, Shabbat service at Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha synagogue, there were just 27 antisemitic incidents reported citywide.
The Anti-Defamation League has reported a 893% spike in antisemitic acts nationwide in the past decade. The largest spike came after an Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in southern Israel triggered war in the Gaza Strip.
The ADL recorded more than 9,300 incidents in 2024 on its Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, according to its website. In 2015, the total was 942.
The head of Beacon Coalition, a Jewish civil rights advocacy organization based in Pittsburgh, told TribLive that the recent incident in the city’s North Side “is an act of hate.”
“When the word ‘Zionist’ is allowed to be turned into a slur … it does not remain rhetoric. It predictably escalates into intimidation and violence,” Jeremy Kazzaz, the group’s executive director, told TribLive Monday. “Community leaders must be unequivocal that this anti-Zionist hate will not be tolerated.”
Recent antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents in Pittsburgh have ranged from vandalism of a Squirrel Hill synagogue to an Ohio man throwing antisemitic fliers out of his SUV while driving through a neighborhood that’s home to more than a dozen Jewish religious buildings.
In April 2024, a man was arrested after he took an Israeli flag outside a Mexican War Streets home, damaged it, then threw it away, Pittsburgh police said.
That man — Mario Ashkar, 36, of Pittsburgh’s North Side — later was charged with ethnic intimidation and criminal mischief.
Ashkar was fired from his job as a contractor with Pittsburgh’s Department of Parks and Recreation after his arrest.
The Jewish federation has received nine reports of antisemitic incidents in the first 19 days of 2026, Brokos told TribLive.
Anyone with information about Saturday’s incident with the Israeli flag is asked to call plainclothes detectives at the police bureau’s Zone 1 at 412-323-7201.
