‘Many dozens’ were gathered at home of Monsey rabbi on 7th night of holiday when attacker entered; stabber later made beeline for nearby synagogue but was locked out
Authorities and first responders gather in front of a residence in Monsey, NY, Sunday, December 29, 2019, following a stabbing late Saturday during a Hanukkah celebration. (AP Photo/Allyse Pulliam)
The rabbi in upstate New York had just concluded the Hanukkah candle-lighting in his home where dozens of Hasidim had gathered, when a masked man entered with a machete, stabbing five people before making a beeline to an adjacent synagogue where congregants had barricaded themselves inside, eyewitnesses said Sunday.
The attack left at least two people in critical condition and reignited fears of anti-Semitism in the insular ultra-Orthodox community, just a month after another stabbing attack and amid what officials have described as a spate of anti-Jewish assaults in the New York region.
The attacker fled the scene, but police later said they arrested a suspect after locating a car connected to the crime scene in New York City.
Eyewitnesses and others described a Hanukkah party that quickly became a scene of horror, with people trying to fend off the attacker or escape the scene.
According to accounts, the attacker entered the home of Chaim Leibish Rottenberg in Monsey around 10 p.m. and silently began slashing those present. In the ensuing melee, attendees responded by hurling tables and chairs to fend off the knifeman, who ultimately left the building in the direction of the nearby synagogue.
He fled the scene after realizing the Jewish house of worship was locked, eyewitnesses said.
“A man walked into the rabbi’s house, immediately after candle-lighting,” Yosef Eliyahu told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster. “He entered the dining hall where the candle-lighting was taking place and began stabbing people.”
“I threw a large table at him, and then he told me, ‘Be careful, I’ll get you,” he added.
Eliyahu said he first rushed the rabbi’s grandchildren, and then others, outdoors. “I pushed them all outside, I started screaming and I ran toward the synagogue,” he said, adding that the attacker headed to the synagogue but fled after finding the doors locked.
“I was praying for my life,” witness Aron Kohn, 65, told the New York Times, describing the knife used by the attacker as “the size of a broomstick.”
“He started attacking people right away as soon as he came in the door. We didn’t have time to react at all,” said Kohn, adding in interviews with other US media that he also started throwing chairs and tables at the intruder.
Kohn said members of the congregation, Netzach Yisroel, apparently barricaded themselves in the synagogue after hearing the yelling from the rabbi’s home.
Local resident Lazer Klein, 19, told The New York Post he saw people “running away, screaming and calling the cops.”
“I saw someone lying on the stairs,” Klein said. “I saw people getting carried out. I saw blood. One guy was lying limp on the stretcher.”
Jack Stein, a neighbor who said he spoke to eyewitnesses, told Israel’s Channel 13 the attacker targeted a developmentally disabled man.
“There was insane hysteria, and someone threw a chair at him,” he said. “The person who threw the chair probably made him more angry and he turned to him and stabbed him another three times. From there, he went into the kitchen, where there was a man who probably walked in from the courtyard, a man with a slight [developmental] disability who stood there shocked and paralyzed by fear. He was hurt the most.”
Yossi Gestetner, a co-founder of the OJPAC (Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council) for the Hudson Valley region, told the New York Times one of the victims was a son of the rabbi.
“The house had many dozens of people in there,” Gestetner said. “It was a Hanukkah celebration.”
Five people were hurt by in the attack, including three whose condition was described as critical or severe.
A month before the attack, a Jewish man was stabbed while walking to synagogue in Monsey in the early morning. Police have not said whether the attack was anti-Semitic in nature or if a suspect was arrested.
But Saturday’s attack was immediately recognized as an assault on the large and growing ultra-Orthodox community in the upstate New York hamlet, weeks after a fatal shooting in a kosher supermarket in nearby New Jersey had also prompted fears among local Jewish residents. Four people were killed in Jersey City, three of them at a kosher deli, which authorities said was fueled in part by anti-Semitism. The killers in the attack were affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite group.
“I live in Monsey, NY. We are all terrified,” tweeted Eliyahu Fink.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio wrote that “I’ve spoken to longtime friends who, for the first time in their lives, are fearful to show outward signs of their Jewish faith.”
The attack comes as US police battle a rash of attacks against Jewish targets.
Last year a white supremacist walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people, the deadliest attack ever committed against the Jewish community in the United States.
A report in April from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) stated that the number of anti-Semitic attacks in 2018 was close to the record of 2017, with 1,879 incidents. In response to the recent surge in hate crimes in New York, de Blasio announced Friday that the NYPD was stepping up patrols in three neighborhoods and increasing the number of visits to houses of worship.
Antisemitism is becoming considered ” insanity per se” taking the perpetrator out of the grasp of justice. Schizophrenics are not totally incompus mensus 24/7 nor in all aspects of life or mentation. They seemingly drift in and out based on stimuli that wouldn’t redirect the attention and intense focus of others sideways.
Given Thomas’ focus we need to understand what or who directed his attention to violence against Jews.
He seems to have a grasp of right and wrong, why else cover his face to conceal his identity but to avoid responsibility? He initially concealed the machete as it was first misidentified as an “umbrella” demonstrating intention to gain access to his intended victims. Why travel at night to a distant location when Manhattan has many Orthodox Jews In “uniform” but to be among strangers increasing his possibility to escape unrecognized? His owm actions demonstrate he knows wrong from right.
His famy doesn’t know right. Who keeps a machete in the kitchen drawer? In the City to chop down what bananas?Disturbed man reenter’s his home covered in blood and none call the police while he obtained bleach to attempt to cover damning evidence. Pastoral attestation to perps gentility? Accessories after the fact.
The web is only an intermediary but not the facilitator. Whomever was in contact with him is responsible for influencing his violence. Family? Pastors? Imams? Black Israelites? Street people? Black Supremecists? And what to do about it?
Jews need to arm themselves and their places of worship need to be secured! Some congregants need to be armed!
To counter any feelings of hatred towards the general ethnicity of those who perpetrated the two latest outrages, I reminded myself that the surgeon who rebuilt my ballet dancer wife’s knee is black and she’s now back en pointe. My urologist is black and he’s a mensch.
Stalin’s right-hand man, who orchestrated the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in which about two million died of starvation or disease was ‘Iron’ Lazar Kaganovich.
Much as we may want to, it’s all too easy to play the race card.
They sowed the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. – Hosea 8:7
This from the New York Post:
The new New York State bail “reform” law, pushed through by the usual bleeding-heart goo-goos, means that more hate criminals have to be set free immediately with no bail. Hate crimes, already exploding in number, are now really going to take off in New York State. Of course, a huge number of of other very dangerous criminals will be let go without having to post bond, causing over-all crime in New York to explode as well.
This from the New York Post:
“Bail reform is setting suspects free after string of anti-Semitic attacks
By Israel Salas-Rodriguez, Khristina Narizhnaya and Laura Italiano
Suspects arrested in last week’s spree of eight anti-Semitic attacks are being quickly released right back into the neighborhoods they terrorized thanks to “bail reform” legislation — which doesn’t even take effect until Jan. 1.
The most recent case of revolving-door justice came Saturday morning, with the release, with no bail, of a woman charged with punching and cursing at three Orthodox women, ages 22, 26 and 31, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at dawn the day before.
The accused assailant, Tiffany Harris, was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on 21 menacing, harassment and attempted assault charges.
“F-U, Jews!” Harris, 30, of Flatbush, allegedly shouted during the attack.
“Yes, I was there,” Harris later admitted to cops, according to the criminal complaint against her.
“Yes, I slapped them. I cursed them out. I said ‘F-U, Jews.”
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As she stood before a judge in Brooklyn Criminal Court with the hood to a navy blue jacket over her head, Harris was in familiar territory.
She still has an open harassment and assault case on the Brooklyn docket from November 2018.
And last month, she was sentenced to no jail time for felony criminal mischief in Manhattan, court records show — a case for which she had repeatedly failed to make court appearances.
Brooklyn prosecutors didn’t even bother requesting bail Saturday, as they could have, given that the reform law, approved in April, technically doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1.
“The de Blasio administration has made it clear that we all need to get into compliance with bail reform now,” said a law enforcement source.
“If prosecutors had asked for bail, corrections would release them immediately,” or they would be sprung on Jan. 1, the source said.
But the de Blasio administration responded that the DOC does nothing without a court order and can’t decide to release anyone.
Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Laura Johnson even made mention of the coming bail reform legislation in ordering Harris freed.
Enlarge ImageAyana Logan
Ayana Logan, the suspect in another recent anti-Semitic attack.Kevin C. Downs For The New York Post
“So I’m releasing her on consent and also because it will be required under the statute in just a few days,” the judge said.
“Ms. Harris you’re being released on your own recognizance.”
She was issued an order of protection barring contact with the three victims — and a court date of Jan. 10.
Harris broke into a grin when approached by a reporter. “Why do you want to know?” she said. ”Goodbye.”
The legislation requires arraignment judges to set free suspects in any non-sexual assault that doesn’t actually cause a physical injury, even in cases of hate crime attacks.
“If there is an injury, then bail could be requested, because then it would be considered a violent felony,” explained Insha Rahman, who, as director of strategy and new initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, worked closely with legislators and the governor’s office in drafting the controversial reforms.
The no-injury loophole will mean a quick get-out-of-jail-free card for all but one of the accused attackers in the eight Hanukkah-timed, anti-Semitic bias crimes that have terrified the city’s Orthodox communities.
“You have to beat the hell out of somebody — or murder them — for there to be any consequences,” said former state lawmaker Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Anti-Semitism. “Otherwise, you are set free.”
He continued: “It’s open season in New York — open season on innocent people. On Jews, on Muslims, on gay people. It applies to anybody. But it’s the Jewish people in particular who have been targeted.”
Only one of last week’s eight attacks resulted in an actual physical injury — that of a 65-year-old Jewish man who was punched and kicked on Monday morning at East 41st Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.
“F–k you, Jew bastard!” the petrified victim told cops his assailant shouted.
The suspect in that crime, Steven Jorge, 28, is indeed alleged to have injured his victim, and so was ordered locked up with no bail pending a psychological examination.
Jorge, though, is the exception.
On Friday night, a suspect in another of the hate attacks was similarly sprung with no bail, though in her case she was at least ordered to attend twice-monthly mental health appointments.
“You f—king Jew, the end is coming for you!” that suspect, Ayana Logan, 43, allegedly shouted as she swung a handbag at a 34-year-old Orthodox mom in Gravesend.
The mother had been holding the hand of her 3-year-old son when the unprovoked attack happened, according to the criminal court complaint against Logan.
By Saturday night, Logan, Harris, and Jorge remained the only suspects apprehended in the hate spree. The assailants in the remaining five attacks remain at large.
Rahman and other reformers argue that the vast majority of suspects in minor assaults are quickly released anyway — and that the new bail reform lets judges set conditions for release that can address the underlying mental health issues.
“That can be mental health counseling, a stay-away order, which wasn’t readily available before, as conditions for release,” said Rahman.
Suspects are getting none of that during their pretrial stays in city jails, Rahman noted.
“Money bail, and keeping someone temporarily detained with no care, doesn’t address at all the long term concerns” of community safety and the well-being of suspects, she said.
But in the city’s Orthodox neighborhoods, there was outrage in learning that even when violent bigots are caught, they’ll be immediately released.
“They were released on no bail?” a 32-year-old Orthodox man asked a Post reporter near where the three women were attacked. “Disgusting.”
Steve Benjamin, 30, of Borough Park, said, “We’re scared to walk at night in the street.
“There is a lot of hate here and I don’t know why. People in the community are scared. It’s very dangerous. It’s just like remembering the days before World War II. I don’t let my kids out alone.
“It should be more justice — they arrest them, but they let them out of jail a day later.””
Yet another outrageous police fail in investigating antsemitic incident.
Yet another outrage: A woman who had commited an anti-semitic assault in Brooklyn on Friday has been released without bail! The New York State legislature has passed a new law requiring judges to release individuals charged with “non-violent” crimes like drug dealing without having to post bail. Of course many of these individuals are violent and dangerous, even if the specific offense they are currently charged with did not involve violence. Stay tuned for a massive spike in violent assaults, including anti-Semitic assaults, throughout New York State.