Community Police & Fire

Menorah at Uptown Gig Harbor vandalized

By the second night of Chanukah, vandals had damaged a menorah installed at Uptown Gig Harbor. 

The shopping complex installed the menorah to celebrate Chanukah, a Jewish wintertime holiday that this year began on Dec. 25.

Chabad of Pierce County gifted the menorah for installation at Uptown’s gazebo. When installed, the tall, metal menorah glowed with electric lights and beaded with strings of fairy lights.

But less than 24 hours later, the installation reportedly had been knocked over, its lights torn out, and some of its branches bent away from its main body.

Lights ripped out of the menorah at Uptown Gig Harbor.

“We don’t push away darkness with sticks and stones, but by lighting a candle, a small candle, it pushes away much darkness,” Rabbi Mendel Kesselman, the rabbi for Chabad of Pierce County, said in response to the vandalism. “Our response to this, is do more good. Go find something special that you could do for someone else. By adding goodness and kindness, that’s the way we push away darkness, hatred, bigotry — all the negative gets pushed away by adding positivity, kindness, and goodness.”

“And it starts at home, it starts with our neighbors,” Kesselman continued. “We can’t fix the world before we fix our own homes and communities.”

Damage to a branch of the menorah at Uptown Gig Harbor.

“Hate has no place in our community. Or any community,” Gig Harbor Mayor Mary Barber said in a brief statement. “We must not let this happen again but instead love each other.”

Uptown Gig Harbor’s management and individual shopkeepers do not have any information about what happened, except what had been reported on social media. Gig Harbor Now confirmed that no security cameras in the area could have recorded the incident.

A police report has yet not been filed, but Barber encourages anyone with information about the incident to share it with the police. Anyone with information can call Gig Harbor Police at 253-851-2236.