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Nicholas Bogan, 17, told ABC7 on Thursday that he’d only begun working part-time at Maurizio’s Pizzeria & Italian Ristorante in Eatentown a little over a week earlier when he asked on Sept. 20 for the first night of Rosh Hashanah off.
In response, he said, he got a series of offensive messages from his manager, Francesco Scotto Di Rinaldi, that he said were shared with two other delivery drivers.
Bogan included screen shots in a civil rights lawsuit that he and his parents filed in Superior Court in Freehold in late November.
“F–k the Jewish,” one of them says. “Put them on fire (fire emoji)/Like hitler was trying to do/He had a point.”
The suit says Bogan “tried to defuse the tense situation and avoid antagonizing” Di Rinaldi by responding with three crying laughing emojis.
But the manager then “doubled down,” it contends, with: “Yeah I’m serious can’t stand them/With the Indians as well/Why would you celebrate some that you don’t belong/You wrong born in america so you don’t belong to them.”
Bogan said he didn’t return to work – and that no one from the pizzeria contacted him to find out why.
The lawsuit claims that Bogan suffered “mental anguish and severe stress…at a time when anti-Semitic violence has been undergoing a worrisome resurgence throughout the world.”
"I feel like this guy needed to be stopped,” Bogan told ABC7 Eyewitness News, “ 'cause if he made comments like this to me, who knows if he made comments to someone else.”
He said he was shocked at first, but “after talking to my parents about it for a little while, it made me realize how upsetting it really was."
"He should be lauded for standing up to bullies," Bogan's cousin, Hank Kalet, wrote in a Facebook post. "Anti-Jewish sentiment is real, and we can’t let it stand."
"It's so unbelievable in this day and age and yet completely believable in this day and age," a friend of Kalet's responded. "I am somewhat speechless."
SEE: New Jersey pizzeria owner allegedly goes on anti-Semitic tirade
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