If you come out of the Kingston Avenue subway station in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you are right in front of the headquarters of the Jewish Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement – and thus in the middle of a group of police officers. Next to the main entrance to the Chabad building are two troopers from the New York State Police and two officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD). All four have one hand on the service weapon. There is another policewoman on the opposite side of the street, around the corner there is a regular NYPD car and a larger police vehicle that looks like a mixture of a mobile operations center and a mobile home.
The number of security guards in Crown Heights, a neighborhood with a large Jewish Orthodox population, is not always that high. But the situation here has been tense since the end of December 2019. Anti-Semitic attacks in New York and the neighboring state of New Jersey had already increased in the weeks before. And then came Monsey.
Fear after the attack
On the evening of December 28, a man armed with a machete broke into a rabbi’s home in Monsey, a small town northwest of New York City. It was the seventh evening of the festival of lights, Hanukkah, and nearly 100 people had gathered in the rabbi’s house to celebrate. The attacker injured five people before being routed by some and arrested by police two hours later. He was charged with five attempted murder and his act was classified as a hate crime. One of the victims is still in a coma with a severe head injury. If the man dies, the perpetrator faces the death penalty.
People at the Hanukkah celebration in Monsey defended themselves against the perpetrator by throwing chairs and other furniture at him.
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“Now it has happened to us too”
“I heard it could have turned out much worse,” says Rivkie Feiner. She is sitting in the meeting room of her communications agency in Monsey. Feiner returned from Israel a few hours ago from a business trip, but she doesn’t seem tired at all. She doesn’t have time for that. In addition to her work, she volunteers in the community, sits on various committees and is something like the unofficial spokeswoman for the Jewish Orthodox community in Monsey.
“If the perpetrator had come in ten minutes earlier, everyone would have been standing in the entrance area, so crowded that they could not have defended themselves,” says Feiner. “And a little later only women and children would have been there because the men had already been sitting in the synagogue.”
Steve Gold, the co-president of the Jewish Federation and Foundation of Rockland County, the county in which Monsey is located, is sitting across from Feiner on this gray January day. He recalls: “On the evening of the attack, I was eating with my wife and friends. We were about to pay when I got the call.”
Gold immediately drove to the crime scene and found that he couldn’t help much. “It was a shock to think: ‘Now it has happened to us too.’ This land is for them [jüdisch-] Orthodox community not sure. “Feiner agrees.” I was never afraid in the past, but when my husband goes to the synagogue now, every time I feel – “Her voice falters for the first time, she puts her hand on her heart:” Will he come home again? “
An event to show solidarity with the victims of the Monsey attack on December 29 was heavily guarded
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Fear is part of everyday life
After the knife attack in Monsey, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said there had been 13 anti-Semitic attacks in his state since early December. Allen Fagin, the vice-president of the Orthodox Union, a Jewish Orthodox association in New York, wrote to DW in an email that he kept hearing about the feeling of insecurity in conversations with members of Jewish communities.
“Jews, like people of all religions, have the right to live out their faith without fear,” said Fagin. “We should be able to feel safe when we go to the synagogue, send our children to school or go shopping in a kosher supermarket.”
Violence on Hanukkah
In the “Chocolatte” café in Crown Heights, pop songs that are reminiscent of Klezmer music are played, and next to the traditional American brownies there are Rugelach, Jewish biscuits, in the display case. At a small table, Dalia Shusterman recounts the night in December when she and her friends were attacked.
“We came back from a Hanukkah celebration, a group of five women. Very close to the Chabad headquarters, a woman pushed into our group and hit one of my friends in the head from the back.” Shusterman spoke to the perpetrator in horror. “She just yelled ‘fuck you Jews’ and ran away.” The perpetrator was caught a little later, but after the act was started and a court date set, she was released again. And the next day he hit a Jewish mother who was carrying her baby in the face.
Regarding Monsey’s perpetrator, Shusterman says: “There has to be a balance between the death penalty and just letting someone go.”
Modern meets tradition: In Crown Heights, parents can buy kippahs for their sons that go with their favorite sport
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Weapons as self-protection?
A young man who is standing outside the Holesome Bagels Deli on Kingston Avenue with three friends says he has lived in Crown Heights for years, but he no longer feels safe here. “How should it feel when you live in a neighborhood where I can’t even listen to music with both earplugs when I walk down the street? You always have to be vigilant.” The young man, who wears short hair and a light blue kippah, no longer wants to take the risk of not hearing what is going on behind him. His wife was already yelled at on the street for being Jewish and then followed with chants.
Other people on that day in Crown Heights say they are not too worried – God will watch over them. But the young man with the light blue kippah, who originally comes from Switzerland, would rather defend himself. He calls for a relaxation of the New York gun laws, which are strict by US standards. “In Switzerland you can just keep your gun after your military service. If it were the same here, people wouldn’t turn you on in the street so quickly.”
Rivkie Feiner and Steve Gold at the State of the State speech by the New York governor in which Cuomo also proposed a new law against hate crimes.
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Feiner says she doesn’t want to live in a world where everyone has to be armed. She advocates holding social networks such as Facebook, on which a lot of hatred is spread, more strictly accountable. Gold added that there was a need to talk more about tolerance and the fundamentals of different faiths in schools in order for attacks to decline.
He himself has never experienced violence, probably because he is not clearly recognizable as a secular Jew without a kippah and traditional clothing. But some time ago strangers sprayed swastikas on the street in front of his house. After that, the carefree life was over for gold too. He has just had a high-tech alarm system installed at home for several thousand dollars. Better safe than sorry.
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