Neo-Nazi sentenced for hate crime, antisemitic mail to rabbi, lawmaker
Editor’s note: This story contains disturbing language.
MACON — The rabbi knitted. While a sentencing hearing for the man convicted of mailing her threatening communications in the form of an antisemitic postcard two years ago played out in a federal courtroom Wednesday, Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar sat with sage-green yarn in her lap.
Knitting is a nervous habit for Bahar. And on this day, during an at times bizarre and disturbing two-hour proceeding, she busied her hands, fashioning a blanket. The blanket, she would later say, is for her three children, children she no longer allows to check their mailbox — “just in case.”
The convicted man, meanwhile, seated two tables away, defended his actions as effective viral marketing in the age of social media.
At her home in February 2024, Bahar, who leads Temple Beth Israel in downtown Macon, received a handwritten postcard that read, “JEWS ARE RATS.”
The other side asked, “Is there a child rape, torture, and murder tunnel under your house? We have the Zyklon B. Use Code ‘GASTHEJEWS’ for 10% off!”
Around the same time two years ago, an identical postcard was sent to the Sandy Springs home of state Rep. Esther Panitch. Panitch, the lone Jewish member of Georgia’s Legislature, had just seen a bill that she co-authored, one defining antisemitism, signed into law. Bahar had testified in support of the Panitch legislation in the wake of a neo-Nazi gathering outside her temple the previous summer.
Prosecutors have since said the North Carolina man who mailed it, Ariel E. Collazo Ramos, had seen news and online accounts of the developments in Georgia and then targeted the two women.
Ramos, 32, ran a business named “Patriot Candle Company” from his home in the city of High Point, peddling what authorities have described as “candles, postcards and other products depicting racial, antisemitic and white nationalist themes.”
Ramos, whom authorities described as a neo-Nazi steeped in extremism, was found guilty at trial in November of mailing threatening communications to Bahar. Ramos’ conviction included a hate crime enhancement that allowed for stiffer sentencing guidelines.
What remained to be seen Wednesday was how much time Ramos might spend in prison. His lawyer argued for none, for time served in a nearby county’s jail since his arrest in May 2024. Prosecutors, meanwhile, asked for the maximum: five years.
Seventy or so people — many of them Bahar’s congregants and some from other denominations — filled the seats in Judge Marc T. Treadwell’s courtroom, which overlooks Mulberry Street less than half a mile from Bahar’s temple.
Near the prosecution’s table, Bahar and Panitch, both of whom had relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, sat side by side.
The women had testified during Ramos’ November trial, and on Wednesday they would make statements. But first, Ramos’ lawyer took the floor.
In arguing for leniency, Attorney Barry Debrow Jr. of Newnan who was Ramos’ third lawyer in the case, said Ramos “wasn’t, in his mind, willfully breaking the law.” Rather, Debrow said, Ramos had mailed the postcards as a marketing ploy.
U.S. Attorney William R. “Will” Keyes spoke next and said Ramos’ actions were those of “a coward.”
Keyes asked the judge to send a message that “threats based in hatred won’t be tolerated.”
Said Keyes: “He threatened these Jewish leaders and then attempted to hide behind the First Amendment and say it’s protected speech, which clearly didn’t work. The jury rejected that. … The reason he did this is because he’s a Nazi. It’s because he hates Jewish people and minorities. You earn a greater sentence for these things.”
Panitch, a defense attorney by trade, later told how receiving Ramos’ postcard “shattered” her sense of security and left her fearful of whether Ramos might violently lash out. “Was he across the street?” she wondered. “Was he watching my home?”
She called it “a calculated act.”
“This wasn’t free speech, as the jury found. … He wanted to terrorize Rabbi Bahar and myself and the entire Jewish community into silence,” Panitch said.
Bahar said Ramos’ threat not only attacked her, but was also aimed at her congregation and her city. “From a deep level, threatening a rabbi, threatening any clergy for that matter,” she said, “is a different kind of violation.”
She said she has since bought a dog that she encourages to bark at the front door. She stopped posting pictures of herself on social media. She has warned her children and told them what to do if they see something suspicious.
Bahar said Ramos’ antisemitic postcard was “deliberate, it was targeted and it was meant to terrorize. It was not random. It was meant to send a message, ‘Stay quiet, be invisible or you will face the consequences.’”
Next, in perhaps one of the most callous, emotionally detached allocutions ever delivered inside the William Augustus Bootle Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, Ramos rambled on for 15 minutes.
Speaking of Panitch and Bahar and their receipt of his postcards, Ramos said the two “did exactly what the marketing was intended to do. … These women were sent this marketing material because they were on the news.”
Ramos said that to drum up business, he scanned the internet looking at what was trending in search avenues to peddle what he described as “products my business has to offer.”
He figured Panitch and Bahar would receive the postcards and the result would “piss them off and … have them communicate that message to someone else.”
Ramos, dressed in an orange jumpsuit from the Butts County Jail, then boasted of his “creative” marketing prowess, how the postcards cost him all of $1 and “I have made every single news station down here in the state of Georgia.” He said his business had gone viral on social media platforms with “millions of impressions.”
He said, “This isn’t about them, even though they want to make it about them. This is business.”
Ramos said “a legitimate discount code” for his candles got “blown out of proportion by people who just seek attention. And that’s what I was counting on.”
Then he read aloud a stream of potential appellate grievances and courtroom observations from a letter he’d written, or as he put it, “I guess you could say a speech.”
He praised Keyes, the prosecutor, for his “strong and confident voice projection” and said, “I wouldn’t doubt he rehearsed for hours in front of a mirror to get the finger pointing and the bounce on his feet just right.”
He belittled his own attorney for “stuttering” and “textbook unpreparedness,” and said that if his lawyer were a salesman he would be “completely incapable of giving away a glass of water to someone dying of thirst.”
When it came time for sentencing, Judge Treadwell addressed Ramos and mentioned how at trial the evidence showed Ramos “carefully schemed to inflict maximum harm, widespread harm, with minimal risk. Or what you thought would be minimal risk.”
Treadwell assessed Ramos as “a product of sinister and evil minds in the neo-Nazi world” and said “that’s a shame for you.”
Then the judge sentenced Ramos to the five-year maximum prison term.
Outside the courtroom, Bahar and Panitch spoke to reporters about the toll the case has taken on them.
Panitch also remarked on how Ramos took no responsibility and showed “no level of empathy.”
“There’s really,” Panitch said, “something wrong with this guy.”
About the Author
Joe Kovac Jr. is Macon bureau chief covering Middle Georgia for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
