Unknown vandals smashed two windows of Char Bar, one of the few kosher restaurants in Washington, D.C., on the night of Nov. 9, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
The incident occurred on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” On Nov. 9, 1938, German Nazis attacked and vandalized Jewish-owned businesses, homes and institutions across Germany and Austria.
Officers from MPD responded to the restaurant in Northwest D.C. after a citizen reported the broken windows, according to a police report. When officers arrived on the scene, they found two shattered windows and two large rocks.
“Really? You don’t have anything better to do with your lives than to waste energy and time and people’s money and stuff to do what?” Michael Chelst, the owner of Char Bar, told DC News Now. “We’re just a restaurant here. We serve the Jewish community.”
Police searched the area and were unable to find the perpetrators nor any security cameras nearby.
MPD initially began investigating the incident as “potentially being motivated by hate or bias,” but in a Nov. 10 update, MPD spokesperson Tom Lynch said there is no information or evidence to support the fact that the vandalism was motivated by hate or bias.
“It’s regrettable that the default position of the MPD is that things are not a hate crime,” Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), told Washington Jewish Week. “There are so many obvious pointers, I wish they would keep an open mind about it and wait for the investigation to develop further before discounting the possibility.
“The fact that there was one restaurant whose windows were shattered on [the anniversary of] Kristallnacht, that it was the most identifiable Jewish eatery in the city does beg the question, ‘Why this place on this night?’” Shemtov continued.
Shemtov, who frequents Char Bar so often that the restaurant has a salad named for him, said there was a small possibility that the offense was not motivated by antisemitism, but “that possibility seems very remote.”
The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington released a statement on Nov. 10 addressing the vandalism and demanding a full investigation and arrest of the perpetrators.
“This vandalism of a Jewish business is deeply disturbing on its own. Its timing on the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, ‘the night of broken glass,’ raises many more questions and concerns that must be answered,” the statement read.
Ron Halber, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said that the offense was “definitely an antisemitic act of violence” given that vandals smashed the windows of an Upper East Side kosher restaurant that same night.
“This was not a dumb antisemite,” Halber told the Washington Jewish Week. “This was a smart antisemite that bashed windows on the anniversary of Kristallnacht to reinforce a historical memory of Kristallnacht and demonstrate their anger towards the Jewish community. It was quite a symbolic act of hate because of what happened and how it happened and when it happened.”
Char Bar is known as a popular spot for local Jewish community members. Josh Hammer, the editor of Newsweek, wrote, “Every Jew in political circles has been to Char Bar before. I was last there just a few months ago.”
He condemned the vandalism as “disgusting and horrific.”
The restaurant was similarly targeted in 2020, when two of its windows were smashed by unidentified vandals throwing rocks. The perpetrators have not been identified despite investigations.
“I hope law enforcement will be very diligent until the perpetrators are caught,” Shemtov said.
Halber said he and the JCRC staff plan to mobilize the community in support of Char Bar, such as by encouraging community members to patronize the restaurant more often. He is thinking about renting out the restaurant’s space for a Chanukah celebration.
“You have to show the perpetrators of antisemitism that they’re going to fail no matter what they do,” Halber said. “Someone commits an antisemitic attack on a [kosher restaurant’s] window[s], we rebuild the window[s]; we eat there. You just never, ever, ever give in to it.”
