In the aftermath of the anti-Zionist vandalism and smashed windows at Manny’s, a fundraiser has raised more than $160,000 for the Mission district cafe and venue overnight.
The vandalism occurred during a protest that wound through the Mission on Monday evening, with thousands of people marching and chanting in opposition to ICE raids in San Francisco and across the country.
Two of Manny’s windows were smashed, and a variety of messages were scrawled on the stucco walls, including “The only good settler is a dead 1,” “Death 2 Israel is a promise,” “Intifada,” and “Fuck Manny,” referring to owner Manny Yekutiel.
The GoFundMe campaign was launched on Tuesday by Jan Reicher, the president of the board of directors for the Jewish Community Relations Council. The contributions started flowing overnight; total funds collected as of press time was $161,960.
(Yekutiel did not respond to multiple requests for comment by Gazetteer SF over phone and email; an attempt to reach out to Reicher through JCRC also didn’t yield any response.)
According to the GoFundMe page, the funds will be used for repairs, “increased security measures” on site for guests and staff, and financial support to “cover lost revenue” as a result of the vandalism.
Aside from owning the cafe, Yekutiel is the executive director of the Civic Joy Fund, a nonprofit that organizes events and advocacy projects around the city. The nonprofit is in part funded by Mayor Daniel Lurie and Levi’s, according to the site. Lurie visited Yekutiel after the incident and “held his hand and consoled him,” according to a San Francisco Chronicle report.
This is not the first time Yekutiel has been the target of anti-Israel rhetoric.
In 2019, a coterie of anti-Zionist groups in San Francisco launched a boycott inspired by Yekutiel’s support of Israel. More recently, Yekutiel posted in support of a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for Israeli hostages. He has said he has “complicated” feelings about Israel, but has expressed criticism of a number of Israel's policies since 2019.
The vandalism was seemingly unrelated to the subject of the Mission protest, which focused on ICE’s aggressive actions against immigrants and US citizens and advocated for San Francisco to resist their presence. However, Yekutiel has been a repeat target over the last several years over his hosting of political figures like District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, and claims that the cafe is a gentrifying element in the community (Manny’s opened in 2018).
Other businesses in the Mission were also hit with vandalism, such as McDonald’s and the coffee and tea shop UpForDayz, which was tagged with the phrases “Fuck ICE” and “Abolition Now.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Manny Yekutiel wrote a Facebook post regarding Jewish independence. The post, which may have been deleted, was cited by a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed by Margot Goldstein and Rachel Lederman and was actually a quotation from an opinion piece written by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in April 2018, not Yekutiel's own words.
