Man who sent antisemitic postcards to Georgia Jewish leaders gets 5-year prison term for hate crime

The man who was convicted of a federal hate crime for mailing antisemitic postcards to Georgia’s only Jewish state representative and a Macon rabbi has been given the maximum sentence under federal law. 

“This sends a message that speech is protected, threats and conduct are not, and that people who are attacked by them or targeted by them should speak up because there is justice available,” said Georgia state Rep. Esther Panitch after the sentencing.

In 2024, Ariel Collazo Ramos of Durham, N.C., stuck postcards in the U.S. mail to Panitch and Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar of Macon’s Temple Beth Israel. 

The postcards, invoking the gas chambers of the Holocaust, bore a postmark for the day after passage of Panitch’s bill to legally define antisemitism in Georgia. Bahar had been publicly supportive of the bill in the wake of two days of agitation by neo-Nazis outside her temple in 2023. 

During her victim statement given in the courtroom of Judge Marc Treadwell in Macon’s Middle District Federal Court, Panitch said the postcard arrived at her home on the day Gov. Brian Kemp was to sign the bill into law. 

“He threatened these Jewish leaders, then attempted to hide behind the First Amendment,” Panitch said of Ramos, who through his trial — and until he was sentenced — claimed the postcards were advertisements for his online business selling neo-Nazi memorabilia, all of which he called constitutionally protected speech. 

Panitch and Bahar both told the courtroom filled with members of Bahar’s congregation as well as a mix of leaders and congregants of a number of different houses of worship that the effect of the postcards, for them and their families, was terror. 

“He can get to us and our participation in public life is not safe,” Bahar said in recalling her thinking two years ago. “For advocating for my community, I received a death threat.”

Early in the sentencing hearing, U.S. Attorney Will Keyes put FBI Special Agent James Maxwell on the stand to offer testimony not presented during Ramos’ trial, about what agents found in his home when they searched it.

Maxwell said the home was full of neo-Nazi memorabilia and literature and that his computer contained digital documents describing how to build various types of bombs and videos of people being killed and even dismembered. 

Maxwell also said the investigation turned up connections to a number of different antisemitic groups, including the same group that spent two days harassing Macon’s Temple Beth Israel in 2023. 

After hearing from Special Agent Maxwell, as well as from Panitch and Bahar, Judge Marc Treadwell signaled he would go beyond the sentencing guidelines established through the federal court practice of scoring the severity of a defendant’s offense. For Ramos, that had meant between 24 and 30 months in federal prison. 

“We sentence drug offenders to long sentences in this court for conduct that pales in comparison to yours,” Treadwell told Ramos. 

Treadwell said he hoped the sentence he handed down of 60 months in federal prison, plus three years of supervised release including computer restrictions which would likely hamper his online business, would serve as a deterrent to others who might try and cleverly disguise illegal hate speech. 

“You carefully schemed to create harm — widespread harm — with minimal risk,” Treadwell said. 

After the sentencing, Panitch said Ramos’ actions are a sign of our current times. 

“This is the new reality for politicians, especially Jewish ones or other minorities,” Panitch told reporters. This is, unfortunately, what we’re seeing with political violence out there. It’s not abnormal. It should be.”

With time served, Ramos will likely be released form federal prison some time in 2029. He still faces related state charges in North Carolina.

This story comes to The Melody through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.