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ANTI-SEMITISM and security cameras in these areas. Hizzoner’s local watch groups — dubbed Neighborhood Safety Coalitions and overseen by his Offi ce for the Prevention of Hate Crimes — will monitor Williamsburg, Crown Heights, and Borough Park, and work with local community leaders, schools, and religious institutions to combat hate. These multi-ethnic coalitions are modeled after the mayor’s efforts to reduce gun violence in East Flatbush, Williamsburg and Bushwick. De Blasio’s announcement follows a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Brooklyn in recent weeks, 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 �� COURIER L 10 IFE, JANUARY 3-9, 2020 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-yearold 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-yearold 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 ‘slow-rolling pogrom.’” Continued from page 1 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 ��