NEW YORK — When a suspect walked into the home of a rabbi celebrating Hanukkah and stabbed five celebrants it was the latest in a week of anti-Semitic attacks in the nation’s most demographically diverse area — and an incident that reverberated across the country.
“Again, here we are: mourning another act of senseless anti-Semitic violence committed against our community and praying for those who were the victims of this hate,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Sunday following the attack a day earlier in Monsey, New York.
“This is at least the 10th anti-Semitic incident to hit the New York/New Jersey area in just the last week. When will enough be enough? These heinous attacks make something abundantly clear: The Jewish community needs greater protection,” Greenblatt said.
Since the Dec. 10 massacre at a kosher grocery store in New Jersey there have been 19 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., including 16 in New York and New Jersey, according to the ADL’s Tracker of Anti-Semitic Incidents. The tracker is a compilation of recent cases of anti-Jewish vandalism, harassment and assault reported to or detected by the group.
Most concerning: Ten of those incidents have occurred in New York since Dec. 23 and involved assaults or threatened violence. The ADL defines assaults as incidents where people’s bodies are targeted with violence accompanied by evidence of anti-Semitic animus or in a manner that attacks Jews for their religious affiliation.
To put the week-long toll in context, the New York Police Department recorded 19 hate-crime felony assault complaints in the first three quarters of 2019.
The surge of high-profile attacks on the Jewish community, including shooting rampages at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, and at a synagogue in Poway, California, in April, have caused consternation around the country.
The main entrance to the B’nai Jacob synagogue in Middletown, Pennsylvania, remained locked on Sunday while congregants celebrated Hanukkah and held a minute of silence for the victims at Monsey’s Netzach Yisroel synagogue.
