Several callers, who identified themselves using fake names, “Zoom bombed” the West Orange Town Council meeting held last Tuesday, Feb. 13. The agenda item which prompted these calls was a proposed resolution supporting a cease-fire in the current Israel-Hamas war. The resolution was eventually tabled by the council.

The callers made numerous antisemitic comments against the Jewish community including denial of the Holocaust, and when asked to refrain from using hate speech by Council President Bill Rutherford, who is Black, they used a racial slur against him.

The callers reportedly do not reside in the township, and more than 10 Jewish residents of West Orange who were on the call spoke as well in an effort to present their position in a concise and composed manner.

Normally, all council meetings are recorded and posted to YouTube, but this meeting was an exception due to the “inflammatory rhetoric and inappropriate remarks made during public comment,” a town spokesperson told Patch after the meeting.

Sheila Lefkowitz, township resident and one of the speakers on the call, shared with The Jewish Link, “The entirety of hate speech of the Zoom bombers was vile and sickening. It’s a cowardly act of online emotional terrorism that pierces the listener’s brain, leaving a permanent mental scar. Over time, I pray that our community will come to support a unity resolution, as already presented to [the] Council by one of our councilpersons. A unity resolution will firmly encourage the beginning process of [our] residents working together to return our community to a state of being civil and neighborly, softening this terrible post-traumatic scar, but never totally eradicating it. The scar will always be there as a mental monument not to use public speech as an opportunity to invite unnecessary division of a geopolitical nature and stick to what is in our local political scope.”

The meeting, which is being described as “depraved” and “inexcusable” among other things, is now under investigation by authorities.