Oregon Man Pleads Guilty in Swatting and Bomb Threats Scheme That Targeted Jewish Hospitals in New York City and Long Island

 

In federal court in Brooklyn, Domagoj Patkovic has pleaded guilty to conspiring to make threats concerning explosives and conveying false information concerning explosives.  The proceeding was held before U.S. District Judge Ramon E. Reyes.  When sentenced, Patkovic faces up to 15 years in prison.  Patkovic was charged in August 2024. 

“As he admitted today, the defendant intentionally targeted Jewish hospitals and care centers in our District with bomb threats.  In doing so, he needlessly endangered patients and staff and diverted critical law enforcement resources from their core mission of keeping our community safe,” stated U.S. Attorney Durham. “We will prosecute dangerous bomb threats and swatting schemes to the fullest extent of the law.” Swatting is a criminal harassment act of deceiving an emergency service into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address.

According to prosecutors, Patkovic was part of a crew of troublemakers who began making anonymous threatening calls to Jewish hospitals and facilities on Long Island among other targets throughout the country in May 2021 - and livestreamed the hoaxes on social media and electronic devices. As set forth in the indictment and in court filings, the defendant himself made threats in at least six separate calls to hospitals (when he told hospital staffer he wanted to kill all Jews, using an antisemitic slur, according to prosecutors) and on a call with local law enforcement who had responded to a 911 notification from one of the hospitals. On several occasions, local police responded to the scene and conducted bomb sweeps. On at least one occasion in September 2021, the hoax bomb threat resulted in a partial evacuation and lockdown of an entire hospital on Long Island. No explosive devices were ultimately found in any of the locations.

Durham expressed his appreciation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office, the New York City Police Department, Nassau County Police Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon for their assistance on the case.

Read the February 19, 2025 DOJ article.

Yehuda Bauer, Preeminent Historian of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, 98

 

Bauer, who fled Nazi Europe shortly before World War II and became one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust, combined academic rigor with humanity as he confronted an unfathomable event and sought to discern its meaning for the future. As a young Israeli historian, he did not set out to become an authority on the Holocaust, or the Shoah, another term used to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Over the next half-century, Dr. Bauer wrote dozens of books that helped form the foundation of modern understanding of the Holocaust and antisemitism. He had lost his extended family in the slaughter, and his work served, in part, to document what had befallen them and so many other victims of Nazi persecution. But he did not regard it as his role simply to “memorialize” the dead, he wrote in his book Rethinking the Holocaust (2001). Instead, he wrote, “I ask questions about what happened and why.” That line of inquiry led him to move beyond existing Holocaust scholarship, which relied in large part on the Nazi bureaucracy’s paper trail and centered on the perpetrators. No true understanding of the Holocaust would ever be reached, Bauer maintained, without studying the victims.

In books including They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust (1973), Bauer challenged a pernicious notion circulating at the time that Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Citing diaries, correspondence, and oral histories, he showed that the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 - when hundreds of Jewish fighters mounted the best known revolt against the Nazis - was far from the only act of insurrection by Jews in ghettos or elsewhere. He also highlighted on the everyday efforts by Jews to retain the dignity that the Nazis tried to strip away.

Bauer wrote extensively about the American response to the Holocaust, including in the book American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945 (1981), and was among scholars who argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unfairly condemned for what critics regarded as his insufficient efforts to stop the Holocaust as it was in progress. Later, Bauer had the painful experience of observing the emergence of pseudo-historians who sought to deny that the Holocaust had occurred or to suggest that the killing had been more limited than was generally understood.

Bauer taught for years at Hebrew University; served as an academic adviser to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped found the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He explored topics including the founding of the state of Israel and the nature of modern antisemitism. His final books included The Jews: A Contrary People (2014). Bauer’s honors included the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honors, bestowed on him in 1998. He spoke critically of Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accused of using the Holocaust for nationalistic purposes and as a “tool for politics.”

Read the October 22, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the entry on Bauer in the Jewish Virtual Library.

Police investigate antisemitic graffiti found at Bethesda school

Montgomery County police are investigating antisemitic graffiti discovered at Bethesda Elementary School on August 11th. The school’s marquee sign was defaced with a statement: “Israel rapes men, women and children,” in red spray paint. The nearby crosswalk and sidewalk also were painted with similar statements and “Free Gaza,” as was a nearby building in the 4900 block of Del Ray Avenue. Authorities were investigating the incident as a bias-related crime.

Several families with young children saw the graffiti while going to the market located there on Sundays, said Guila Franklin Siegel, associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. Siegel said the farmers market is owned by a Jewish person and located in a neighborhood with several synagogues nearby. A few families with young children, and the Bethesda Urban Partnership helped to clean up the vandalism.

Thomas Taylor, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, called the incident horrifying, adding that he was grateful for the volunteers who cleaned up the vandalism. He said that the school district is partnering with organizations to train staff on how to address hate and bias in the classroom, which he said “will ultimately have a ripple effect in the community and spread to our community.”

Read the August 12, 2024 Washington Post article.