Video catches ex-Christian pastor scrawling swastika on Jewish neighbor's property: report

A Jewish woman in California says her doorbell camera caught the moment her neighbor scrawled a swastika on a box of seltzer outside her front door.

Leah Grossman confronted her neighbor, who is a retired pastor from the United Methodist Church in California, just after the camera captured the incident.

"And I just shattered. You know, I just fell to pieces. Like I've never shook like that before. My toes were shaking. I get emotional thinking about it because it reminds me of all the people I know, my family, my children," she told CBS News.

Video of the exchange shows Grossman telling her neighbor, "I have a camera. Like, what is that? What did you draw there?"

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"Is that a Nazi symbol?" Grossman asks.

"No," the neighbor replied.

"What is that?" she presses.

"I'm just walking by here. I don't know," he replies.

Grossman then points out to the neighbor that he was captured on video, but he still continued to plead ignorance, saying. "I don't know."

It's unknown if Grossman reported the incident to police.

Grossman says the neighbor had previously called her a "fascist" at a Homeowners Association meeting for hanging the flag of Israel from her balcony in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks.

"What's going on in the world has really opened up a crevasse of anti-Semitism and I think people feel really emboldened to push Jewish people around. People just shouldn't get away with this," Grossman told CBS News.

When the neighbor was questioned about the incident by a local news channel, he claimed he was trying to educate Grossman about the history of the swastika as a Buddhist symbol, adding that "in hindsight, the way I went about it was not the right away to go about it. It was bad judgment on my part. I realize that."

According to The Daily Mail, Grossman told a local news channel that he had apologized to her, but she didn't accept it.

"I know in my heart of hearts that it's completely self-serving, has nothing to do with any kind of contrition as far as what was done to me, what was done to my children," she said.