(JTA) — Zechariah Mehler wanted to see the swastika for himself.
It was September, and Milwaukee was abuzz over a mural that had gone up on the side of a commercial building in the city’s sixth district. Painted on slabs of vinyl affixed to the brick, the mural — a large rectangle about the size of the building’s ground floor — featured a background that appeared to depict mass graves, weeping mothers, drones and other scenes of carnage in Gaza.
At the center: a Jewish star with a swastika inside it, along with the words, “The irony of becoming what you once hated.”
The city council had passed a resolution condemning the mural, and local Jewish leaders had called to remove it. But the building’s owner, a Palestinian real estate businessman named Ihsan Atta, said he was making a principled stand against Israel’s war in Gaza. When a local mother splashed black paint on the mural and confronted him on camera, yelling, “What are you promoting for our kids to see?” Atta yelled back and had it repainted by the next day.
Any doubts that Mehler had about whether the mural was antisemitic were erased when he visited the site and, he said, saw anti-Zionist protesters harassing Orthodox Jewish teenagers.
“You had the Free Palestine group just screaming at these kids, you know, ‘baby murderers and Zionist pigs,’” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It was aggressive, it was intimidating.”
Taking matters into their own hands
So Mehler — a 42-year-old dreadlocked former tech worker known as “Zee” who used to work as a kosher caterer and run a blog about kosher food — said he decided to take matters into his own hands.
On the night of Sept. 14, he recruited his 74-year-old father Peter, a retired rabbi who is in poor health, to accompany him to the site of the mural. They brought an ax, a sledgehammer and a pry bar and went to work. Moving quickly, the two struck the mural and pulled the vinyl plates off the wall, in full view of Atta’s security cameras. Zechariah turned to one and flipped it off: “Double middle fingers,” the police report would later read.
The pair were derailed — and the incident nearly veered into violence — when a bystander who supported the mural tried to intervene. So Zechariah Mehler returned the following day to finish the job, prying the remaining panels from the wall.
Two weeks later, shortly before Rosh Hashanah, police came to his home. He and his father were arrested and charged with criminal damage to property, which in Wisconsin carries up to nine months of jail time.
Mehler says he knows that what he and his father did was illegal — in fact, he expected to get caught. But he’s convinced they did the morally correct thing, the only option that didn’t require them to ignore or shrink from a threat.
“It is certainly destruction of private property,” he said in an interview. “The question becomes whether or not [the mural] posed a tangible threat to the Jewish community. That’s our argument.”
Peter Mehler says that he, too, has no regrets. He lives with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its own nerves.
“The last 10 years, I’ve been a shut-in, basically,” he said. “But this was an opportunity for me to have a last chance to be active about this message. We cannot allow Jews to be converted into Nazis.”
Now, the Mehlers are hoping to make their case in court. A preliminary hearing is set for Tuesday, though it’s unclear how the case will progress. At a previous court appearance, Zechariah Mehler called Atta profane names and, he said, tried to take a selfie with the mural’s owner to post on social media. Since then, a new district attorney has been sworn in to prosecute cases in Milwaukee, and he hasn’t yet commented publicly on this one.
The case has become a major flashpoint in Milwaukee, where Golda Meir grew up and first became active in the Labor Zionist movement, and where some vocal pro-Palestinian activists have brought a level of hostility to local affairs never before seen by the city’s Jewish community.
Over the summer, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose main campus library is named after Meir, enraged some local Jewish groups by making a deal with his campus’ pro-Palestinian encampment; he wound up apologizing. A progressive Jewish member of Milwaukee’s city council, who’d co-signed a joint resolution condemning the mural, recently died by suicide, an act some of his friends say was motivated by anti-Zionist bullying.
The Mehlers’ case is also capturing attention beyond the city, where the question of how to respond to anti-Israel displays has flummoxed and sometimes divided Jews.
The leader of a group called Betar US, which advocates for Jews to be more forceful, even physical, in confronting the threats they see, invited the father and son to represent the organization in Milwaukee. The group also helped raise nearly $20,000 toward their legal fees.
Betar US is a reboot of a century-old paramilitary group originally founded by early 20th-century Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Betar members have been involved in several altercations with pro-Palestinian demonstrators over the last year, and it has even gone after other Jews at times. The group is also collecting information about international students who participate in U.S. pro-Palestinian protests in an effort to get the students deported.
“My politics and Betar’s politics are very different. I’m not a right-wing guy,” Zechariah Mehler said. But he said the group’s president, the Jewish public relations executive Ronn Torossian, assured him, “This is more about, do you believe that Israel has a right to exist, that Jews have a right to live in peace?” Of utmost importance, he said, was that Jews should stop “just being meek and allowing ourselves to be threatened and walked over. So I said, sure.”
Torossian has called the Mehlers “heroes.” He said in an interview that their actions perfectly fit the nonprofit’s vision of seeing Jews publicly fighting back against perceived threats to themselves or Israel.
“The Mehler family is a big reason why we restarted Betar,” said Torossian, who said he grew up in earlier iterations of the movement. “It’s a shame that this man has to stand up and act alone. It’s a shame that this man is facing a criminal trial and the entire Jewish community is silent. That won’t continue. I can assure you, we’re going to get him more support.”
It does not appear that any of the support will come from local Jewish institutions and organizations, whom Zechariah Mehler derided as “deer in headlights” when it comes to the problems presented by anti-Israel activism.
A representative for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council reiterated the federation’s denunciation of the mural as “antisemitic for many reasons,” including that it promotes Holocaust denial and dehumanizes survivors and victims of the Holocaust. But the groups declined to comment further on the Mehlers’ case or on the mural’s actual removal.
The groups have in the past discouraged Jewish vigilantism: In May, amid intense activity at the UWM encampment, the JCRC advised local Jews not to counter-protest, saying that it could escalate a risky situation.
When the Mehlers sought to purchase an advertisement in the local Jewish newspaper, which is owned by the federation, they were rebuffed. “You come with an ongoing backstory that could present content and/or reputation challenges for a Jewish publication,” a federation executive wrote to Zechariah Mehler, in an email that JTA obtained. The official added that the federation “can’t put ourselves in a position where folks can even get the sense that we endorsed any actions of your past.”
Some in the city are sympathetic to the Mehlers. Matt Stolzenberg, a tattoo artist whose parlor had been located in the same building as the mural, has been outspoken about his distaste for it. Following its installation, Stolzenberg — who says he is not Jewish but has Jewish family — said he and his business partners moved his shop’s location at considerable expense, “specifically to avoid vandalism and other issues that a giant swastika will bring to a business.”
Some of his customers interpreted his move as “an anti-Palestine thing, which I’m not at all,” Stolzenberg said. “But I’m also just not anti-Jew, nor pro-swastika.”
Asked his views on the Mehlers’ case, he added, “I think that if I were Jewish, there would be no other option than to tear down the giant swastika mural.”
Atta installed the mural in place of a previous one erected in memory of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot by police in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020 who became a symbol of nationwide racial justice protests that year.
After the first vandalism of the mural, by a local woman, Milwaukee’s city council issued a statement condemning the image as “hurtful and divisive” and saying that it “is not welcome in our community.”
“Some people look for any excuse to wave a swastika,” the council members wrote in their Sept. 14 statement. “It has long been a symbol of intolerance and hatred, designed to psychologically injure and oppress those who are different.” The council member who represents the district where the mural was located did not return a request for comment.
Atta also did not respond to requests for comment made through an intermediary. But he has consistently defended his mural, including at a press conference he held at the site shortly after the Mehlers tore it down. The conference was called by the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine, whose co-chair is Atta’s sister.
“It was an artistic way of expressing the current genocide that is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by Israel and which is being supported by our government and funded with our tax dollars,” Atta said of the mural at the event. He said the Star of David on the mural was not a Jewish symbol but instead pulled from the flag “of an apartheid regime” as a political symbol.
Adopting language popularized in large part by Meir Kahane, the far-right Jewish extremist, as a response to the Holocaust, he added, “It is a statement to say that ‘never again’ means never again for anyone.”
Several of his supporters wore black T-shirts emblazoned with the mural’s swastika design at the event, which was also attended by local members of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
Yet even JVP, which tends to back Palestinian-led protests that many other Jews find offensive and even antisemitic, acknowledged the mural’s provocations.
“We understand why it’s polarizing,” the Milwaukee chapter, which is a member of the pro-Palestinian coalition, wrote in a lengthy Instagram statement posted just prior to the mural’s destruction. “There is a legitimate critique that can be made about it, particularly concerning the language of the mural implying that Jews, whom the Nazis persecuted and exterminated during the Holocaust, have become oppressors not unlike the Nazis in regards to Zionism and Palestine.”
The statement, which the chapter’s co-founder, Rachel Ida Buff, read at the press conference, added, “It should be made abundantly clear that Judaism and Zionism are two different things, but it understandable how someone might read the mural as conflating the two.”
But the statement went on to conclude that Israel’s behavior was “far more reprehensible and antisemitic” than the mural, and that “it is not our or anyone else’s place to police Palestinians as they express their pain through creative means.”
Local JVP chapter co-founder Rachel Ida Buff, a history professor at UWM who is Jewish, told JTA she personally believed the mural “was meant to generate conversation, which it succeeded in doing.”
Buff added, “If seeing the image of a swastika in River West upsets people more than the images of murdered children coming out of Gaza, that is a moral problem.”
What upset Peter Mehler most when he saw the mural, he said, was thinking about his former congregants, many of them Holocaust survivors, at the synagogues he led in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Northbrook, Illinois.
“I was really outraged,” he said. “For them, this would have been extremely traumatic. And it was traumatic for me, too, to watch this guy take the Star of David and make it into a swastika.”
He rejected any comparisons between the Gaza war and the Holocaust.
“The war in Israel is nothing like the Holocaust, and I am offended by the idea that the Palestinians have turned this into us as offenders when they, in fact, were the attackers,” he said. “You know, once they attacked, then they have to realize that they opened up Pandora’s box, and anything that Israel did, they were responsible for.”
Both men said their activism had almost taken a dangerous turn when the bystander accosted them while they were ripping down the mural. The man “said to me, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what genocide is. Describe genocide to me,’” Peter Mehler recalled.
The exchange triggered him, and he said he considered hitting the man with his hammer. But Zechariah said he “explained to my father that our methodology was not one that was intended to be aggressive.”
The bystander, Michael Gauthier, shared a similar account of the encounter during the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine press conference. “I stood here on this curb and there was an angry man screaming in my face, waving a hammer, saying he was going to hit me with it,” he recalled. “Thank God that didn’t happen. Thank God his partner in crime talked him down a little bit.”
Family members tried to discourage Peter from joining his son in the first place, citing his health, both Mehlers said. But he insisted.
“It’s the responsibility of a rabbi to be the symbol of true north for the Jewish community,” Peter Mehler said. “We’ve got a symbol of antisemitism hung on a wall, and not anybody will speak out about it.”
Both father and son say they’re prepared to go to jail over their actions. Peter insisted things wouldn’t come to that and vowed to appeal any penalty. Zechariah, meanwhile, said he would relish the attention such a sentence would bring.
“You know what’ll happen if they put me in jail for this? Oh my God, then every Jewish organization would be on it,” he said. “Alan Dershowitz would be here. They don’t want that.”