Photo of Nazi-saluting teens on Mercer Island rattles community

A photo of two Mercer Island teens making the Nazi salute circulated widely on social media on Tuesday morning, rattling the small city east of Seattle.

In an email sent on Tuesday afternoon, Donna Colosky, superintendent of the Mercer Island school district, and Vicki Puckett, the high school principal, wrote that the images “were not created or shared with malicious intent toward others.”

“Still,” they wrote, “these images are highly offensive and hurtful.”

The image shows the two teens standing in snow, in the park over the I-90 tunnel, which locals call “the lid.”

A quarter of households on Mercer Island are Jewish, and the island is home to the Stroum Jewish Community Center.

The Nazi salute is outlawed in Germany, and it is a crime to use the salute in Poland and Slovakia. In other countries it can be considered hate speech.

In the email to Mercer Island families, Colosky and Puckett wrote that the images “negatively impacted our educational environment.”

The educators said they launched an investigation as soon as they learned of the situation. The photo of the Mercer Island teens emerged at a time when reports of anti-Semitism are on the rise.

On Sunday in Orange County, California, photos of teens crowded around red beer cups lined up in the shape of a swastika went viral on Twitter and Snapchat. The California teens were “laughing, toasting and Seig Heiling over the Nazi symbol,” according to NPR.

On the same day, police found swastikas drawn in blood at a park near the Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple De Hirsch Sinai told KUOW in September 2017 that he had started to hear about anti-Semitism from the younger generation — surprising, he said, because he hadn’t experienced that much himself growing up in America.