The family who found the flyer in Ward 3 had a mezuzah, like the one above, in the entryway to their door. (Photo by Daniel Mitsuo.)

A Jewish family in Ward 3 reported waking up Monday morning to an anti-Semitic flyer on their doorstep.

“It was folded up very small and put on my doorstep,” says Cortney Weinbaum, who has lived near the Tenleytown neighborhood for a decade. “I thought it was a flyer for a landscaper or pizza delivery—I get that stuff all the time.”

But when she unfolded the piece of paper, she says she instead found a two-sided printing of “what looked like lots of clippings and different snippets of different articles. It had all different kinds of conspiracies on a variety of topics. Being anti-Jewish was the only theme.”

Weinbaum’s family has a mezuzah outside her door, a small decorative case traditionally hung outside the entrance to a Jewish home, and she says she’s frightened that whoever placed the flyer may be targeting her family for their faith.

She reported the incident to D.C. police and is calling on other residents to do the same. “My first thought was to crumple it up,” says Weinbaum. “But if you don’t report these, there’s no way to track them.”

The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that Weinbaum filed a report on Monday morning. She says she did not take any photos of the flyer to prevent spreading its message, and police have the one she received. This story will be updated once the police report is completed.

This is by no means the first report of bigoted flyers around D.C. At nearby American University last week, posters of Confederate flags were found at several locations, and appear linked to flyers hung around northern parts of Ward 4 in August.

Flyers that falsely claimed to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement appeared in different D.C. neighborhoods in June, and later in the summer, a white nationalist group bragged about flyers it hung downtown. The city has also seen anti-Semitic graffiti and nooses, including an instance at American University.

From Weinbaum’s description, the style of the flyer and manner of delivery differs from those, though. What appeared on her doorstep was folded up, rather than hung, and did not have any visible logos.

Weinbaum does not know if other people on her block similarly received the flyer, and it’s that uncertainty that makes her uneasy.

“I’m feeling very nervous thinking, is this the first step of something that might escalate?” she says. “Is this someone bored who thinks it’s a joke? Or is this part of something bigger?”