By Rebecca Szlechter in JNS
On Friday night, Aug. 14, a man allegedly hit a 63-year-old woman and spat upon and heat-butted a 65-year-old security guard at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. Two days later, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani began a weeklong “planned vacation with his family in upstate New York,” according to City Hall.
JNS asked Jewish leaders in the city whether they thought that the mayor, who has been widely accused of fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, ought to have canceled his vacation to stand with Jewish New Yorkers after the attack at the synagogue and less than a month after a visibly Jewish man was stabbed near an Upper West Side synagogue by a man who, witnesses say, yelled “Allahu akbar.”
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Rabbi Yaakov Menken, founding executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JNS that the question is not if Mamdani should be taking a weeklong vacation, but “how soon he will retire or be retired.”
“Hateful violence starts from hateful incitement, and he has been inciting violence against our community since long before he took office,” he said.
Read the full article at JNS
Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.