A swastika was scrawled inside a circle on the infield dirt of a baseball field behind the Solomon Schechter Day School in Williston Park and a structure used in a Jewish religious observance was vandalized on the weekend of Oct. 7.

The damage to the sukkah, a traditional structure to observe the Jewish harvest ,was discovered bent on the morning of Oct. 10 and Nassau County Police Department officers from the 3rd Precinct were summoned to the school, according to Cindy Dolgin, Solomon Schechter’s head of school.

That same afternoon, a swastika scrawled inside a circle on the infield dirt of a baseball field behind the school was discovered with a profanity also scrawled in the dirt, and the police were summoned once more.

“It’s a terribly unfortunate thing done by some stupid kids,” Dolgin said.

Dolgin said students in the Schechter School were upset by the incidents. Approximately half of the members of the student body at the school had relatives who died during the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, she said.

In the wake of the incidents, Village of Williston Park Mayor Paul Ehrbar and Mineola School District officials visited the school to demonstrate their support for the newly relocated private Jewish school and apologize on behalf of the community for the incident.

Ehrbar addressed the students of Schechter’s upper school on Tuesday.

“I was outraged and disappointed. This type of behavior is unacceptable anywhere, including Williston Park,” Ehrbar said. “I told them the behavior was not indicative of the behavior of residents in Williston Park but an action by some uncaring, disrespectful individual most lacking in any understanding and compassion.”

Ehrbar said he offered Dolgin any assistance and support the Village of Williston Park could lend the school.

Mineola School Board President Christine Napolitano brought a bouquet of roses to a meeting with Dolgin on Tuesday. She said she communicated her sense of concern and outrage over the incident in commiserating with the Schechter head of school.

“It was so vile,” she said of the anti-semitic graffiti. She said she met with Dolgin and brought the flowers “on behalf of the school board and every decent person in the community.”

Napolitano said students in the Increase the Peace Club at Mineola High School are planning multi-school event, including students from their high school, Chaminade High School and Solomon Schechter.

“We need to get together with members of the community to make sure nothing like that happens again. We need to take some steps to see that some education takes place,” she said.

Dolgin said she appreciated the “outpouring of support” from adults in the community in the aftermath of the incident.

Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler met with Dolgin last week to discuss security issues at the former Cross Street School. Nagler negotiated the five-year lease with Solomon Schechter, formerly located in Glen Cove, for the Cross Street facility after the Mineola Board of Education had decided to close the grade school in the first phase of its plans to consolidate facilities in the school district.

Concerns had been raised by Williston Park residents about access to the playing fields on the property, which had been used by CYO and Williston Park Little League teams with the permission of the Mineola School District administration. Schechter officials had made it clear that the fields would still be available to the community when Schechter students were not using them.

The spectre of anti-semitism had surfaced at one point prior to a public meeting in Williston Park about the Mineola district leasing the school when someone inserted a flyer in the Sunday mass bulletin at nearby St. Aidan Church which described Schechter as a “yeshiva,” a Jewish rabbinical school.

Solomon Schechter is putting additional security measures in place gates on the field to enclose it after dark.

“We’re putting in place the things that we need to make sure we’re more secure,” Dolgin said.

She said the school had experienced a problem with debris on the fields, particularly pizza boxes that were strewn there on weekends.

“I’m a great believer in public use of space. I hope that we don’t have repeats of this,” she said of the vandalism.

Dolgin said she was still “very upbeat” about the community and had been “overwhelmed and pleased” with the “warm reception” the school received when it opened last month.

She said she is encouraging Solomon Schechter students to eat lunch in the sukkah to demonstrate their pride in their cultural heritage. In the tradition of the seasonal observance, the sukkah is intentionally constructed as a temporary shelter to symbolize the 40 years the tribes of Israel wandered in the desert after escaping from bondage in Egypt.

“The whole purpose of a sukkah is to remind us of the precariousness of life,” Dolgin said.