The message was at once bone-chillingly clear and enigmatic: “Kill the Jews, 7-14-05.”

At least 17 residents of the Fresh Meadows neighborhood awoke yesterday to find anti-Semitic epithets scrawled across their cars in black marker, police said.

For the ethnically diverse but predominantly Jewish community in northeastern Queens, which includes many Holocaust survivors, it was a halting reminder of three anti-Semitic incidents that took place at a nearby co-op last month: The same phrase was penned on the walls of Electchester Homes, a housing complex built in the 1950s for members of the electrical union, on April 3, 16, and 24, police said.

“We thought it was going to be some wacko and it would be a one-time thing, but now it seems to be more than that,” a Democrat who represents the neighborhood, Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn, said. “It seems to have gotten worse.”

Also yesterday, police reported two other incidents that raised concerns over a surge in anti-Semitic bias crimes in the city. A swastika was found on a storage locker in a staff building at Jamaica Hospital.

In Co-op City, a swastika was etched into a bench.

In Fresh Meadows,it was cars parked along 164th Street between 65th and 67th avenues that were vandalized. The exact number could rise as the investigation progresses, police said.

What appeared to be a date written on the cars beneath the epithet – 7-14-05 – puzzled members of the community and the police. The cryptic postscript sent the education outreach coordinator of the Holocaust Resource Center and Archives at Queensborough Community College, Arthur Flug, to the history books and the Internet. He found that July 14, 1933, was the day Adolf Hitler banned all political parties except for the Nazi Party in Germany. The most famous July 14 date – Bastille Day in France – does not seem to explain the epithet, Mr. Flug said.

“It may have a more personal meaning,” he said. “You’re not dealing with someone who is rational on this one.”

The attack both frightened and enraged the community.

“It’s horrible. It’s disgusting. It’s terrible,” the district manager of the local Community Board 8, Diane Cohen, said.

Mr. Flug said he had just returned from a trip to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, where memorials were held to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and a celebration of the fall of the Third Reich.

“A week ago I stood by gas chambers and ovens,” he said. “Then you come home and you see this on Jewel Avenue. At the least, it was upsetting. Usually we get things like this on Adolf Hitler’s birthday.”

That day was April 20, 1889.

An owner of one of the vandalized cars, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her 30s, told the director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League, Joel Levy, that she was frightened, one reason she did not want her name used in print.

Although the number of anti-Semitic incidents has not changed significantly in the last year in New York City, it has increased nationwide during that time, according to a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League.

“There has been a global spread of anti-Semitism spreading out from the Middle East and moving through Europe,” Mr. Levy said. “Now it’s come to our shores.”