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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, JANUARY 5, 2020
particularly during the Jewish Festival of Lights,
on top of a bloody stabbing upstate on Saturday and
a shooting of a kosher grocery store in New Jersey
on Dec. 11.
The Hanukkah hate spree began in Williamsburg
on Dec. 23, when a pair of teenage bruisers attacked
two children — aged six and seven — from
behind, punching one of them in the stomach in the
lobby of a public housing complex on Wilson Street
near Bedford Avenue at around 8:40 pm, according
to police.
The next day in Crown Heights, a group of harassers
hurled a bottle and a string of curse words
at a 25-year-old Jewish man on Kingston Avenue
near President Street at around 1:40 am, according
to a Police Department spokeswoman, who added
that the victim was unharmed.
Less than four hours later, some punks punched
a 56-year-old Jewish man from behind on Union
Street between Utica and Rochester avenues in
Crown Heights. The victim was not seriously
harmed, and refused medical attention at the
scene, cops said.
On Dec. 26 an assailant yelled “you f—— Jew,
your time is coming” at a 34-year-old woman, who
was walking with her three-year-old son on Avenue
U near W. Fifth Street — before hitting the
mother with her bag, police sources told the New
York Post.
Authorities arrested a 42-year-old man for the
latest attack, charging him with assault as a hate
crime, weapons possession, harassment, and acting
in a manner injurious to a child, cops said.
On Saturday night, a man stormed a rabbi’s
home in Monsey, NY, and stabbed fi ve Hasidic Jews
with a machete as they celebrated Hanukkah.
The attacks come at the tail end of a year that
saw a sharp rise in hate crimes — as New Yorkers
reported 311 incidents through September of 2019,
compared to 250 during the same period of 2018,
with 52-percent of those targeting Jewish people,
according to the Police Department statistics.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Sunday
he would direct state police to increase patrols in
Jewish neighborhoods across the state, labelling
the upstate rampage an act of terror.
“Hostility based on religion, race, creed, immigration
status is an American cancer that is
spreading throughout the body politic,” Cuomo
said in a statement. “In New York, we will never
tolerate such hate and hostility in any form, and we
will put an end to this cancer not just through our
words, but through our actions.”
But a cadre of Brooklyn politicians representing
Orthodox Jewish areas of the borough said Cuomo’s
efforts were not enough and demanded more state
and federal resources, including the New York National
Guard to patrol Jewish neighborhoods and
a special prosecutor specifi cally to investigate and
prosecute anti-Semitic crimes currently under the
jurisdiction of local district attorneys.
“Simply stated, it is no longer safe to be identifi
ably Orthodox in the State of New York. We cannot
shop, walk down a street, send our children to
school, or even worship in peace,” said the letter
penned by state Sen. Simcha Felder (D–Borough
Park), Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein (D–Midwood),
and Councilmen Chaim Deutsch (D–Sheepshead
Bay) and Kalman Yeger (D–Borough Park).
“This has been appropriately described as a ‘slowrolling
pogrom.’”
ANTI-SEMITISM
Continued from page 1
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea discusses the arrest of the man accused of a machete
rampage in Monsey, NY that targeted members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish
congregation. Photo by Todd Maisel