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Facebook Takes Down Anti-Semitic Page Attacking The Lakewood Jewish community

Facebook has unpublished an anti-Semitic page that alleged to be opposing the expansion of the Orthodox population around Lakewood, New Jersey.

The page, called “Rise Up Ocean County”, had been called out as anti-Semitic by local leaders.

“We’ve been clear that this page trafficked in hate that has no place in NJ,” state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “More to do to stop the spread of hate online, but this is a step in the right direction.”

The page had been taken down temporarily in January but was later reinstated.

The group said its purpose was to mobilize locals to oppose overdevelopment around Lakewood, a town in the central part of New Jersey that has seen a boom in its Orthodox population. It encouraged members to speak out at town meetings and said it was producing a documentary.

Local leaders — Jewish and non-Jewish — said its activism crossed the line into Jew hatred.

“It’s a vicious group that’s trying very hard to put a genteel veneer on their deeply anti-Semitic agenda,” Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, a spokesman for the Lakewood Vaad, a local Jewish communal organization, said last year.

The story of the “Rise Up Ocean County” page parallels a similar facebook page in Rockland county, named “Clarkstown, What they Don’t Want You To Know.”

The Clarkstown page, founded in 2013, has been called out in public as an anti-Semitic page that finds fault in the “Hasidic” Jewish Community for many of the county’s ills. Many of the published comments on the page go beyond veiled anti-Semitism, openly showing the hate fueled by the page.

In response to the closure of the “Rise Up Ocean County” page, the Clarkstown page posted an article of the closure, insinuating that the closure was due to political pressure.

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