Fires set early Tuesday morning are leaving many questions. The search continues for a suspect accused of not only setting off the fires but also trying to intimidate a member of the Jewish community, with an anti-semitic message left on the street.

Tuesday, Jewish community groups and organizations, the Clayton mayor and community members condemned what happened on a residential street, but it comes at a time when hate crimes and anti-Semitic incidents around the country have become more pronounced.

“It’s really a sad situation. I don’t know how we get beyond it, this,” said Stephen Singer, who lives in Clayton.

The early morning scene led to a day of processing and reflection. Singer describes the situation as upsetting.

Singer said, “Clayton’s a very safe area and it’s kind of stunning, but it’s very sad that these kinds of anti-semitic incidents seem all over the place, so no place seems to be immune.”

Clayton police said it was around 3 a.m. Tuesday, when three cars - two on the street and one in a driveway - were torched on Westmoreland Avenue. On the street, a message was left on the pavement. Part of it was directed at a specific person, but it ended by reading “Death to the IDF.”

IDF stands for Israel Defense Forces, the name of the Israeli military. The scene has since cleared, the remains of cars towed off and the words washed away.

It’s at a time when Washington University Goldstein Professor of Jewish History & Thought Jonathan Judaken said there has been an increase in racial and ethnic violence.

“They’ve dramatically skyrocketed against Jews in the aftermath of October 7. So it’s the case that hate crimes against Jews for a very long time been the highest number of hate crimes in the United States. Hate crimes against Muslims have also increased. In the context of the pandemic, hate crimes against Asians increased. We’ve seen a proliferation of racial and ethnic violence in the last few years,” said Judaken. “But hate crimes against Jews in particular have dramatically accelerated following October 7 and especially as the war in Gaza had deepened and become more horrific over the course of time.”

Professor Judaken has spent years researching the topic of anti-semitism, the causal factors and how to combat it.

He explained, “It runs the gambit from stereotypes and prejudice to discrimination, all the way to murder and violence.”

FBI crime data released Tuesday provided a new look at this issue, reporting that in 2024, 69 percent of religious-based hate crimes were anti-Jewish.

Professor Judaken pointed to incidents in recent months, including the targeted attacks in Boulder, Colorado in June and a shooting at a museum in Washington, D.C. in May.

“This kind of political violence is ultimately so completely self-defeating because the only thing that it does is further encourage solidarity among Jews who don’t see eye to eye at all on the issues of Israel-Palestine. It helps build solidarity for Jews and for Israel,” said Professor Judaken. “Not to mention the fact that it’s a wider problem of attempting to solve political issues through direct and unmediated violence, and that’s just a degeneration to times where hopefully we would think that we were sort of beyond that and we can find deeper, broader solutions.”

Addressing this, he said, has no simple solution.

He said, “The solutions are not going to take place by next week or next month. The deepest solutions, I would say, are connected to interfaith dialogue. To education. I’m an educator, so I have to believe in that. I think in the long term, to a much broader and deeper commitment to the anti-racist struggle globally.”

Though the impact of what happened on this street will linger.

“It’s a lovely community, that doesn’t make it, obviously, immune from people doing hateful things,” Singer said.

Clayton police tell First Alert 4 there is one person who started the fires, but they don’t know if that person acted alone, so they’re looking for the community to provide any leads.

Clayton’s mayor also said the city is dedicating extensive resources to this case, along with getting help from partners, including the FBI.

Copyright 2025 KMOV. All rights reserved.