New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani got a “warm welcome” from Borough Park residents and local leaders when he visited Eichler’s Judaica on Wednesday ahead of Rosh Hashanah, a City Hall spokesman told JNS.
Sam Raskin, a spokesman for the mayor, told JNS that Mamdani was “proud to visit Borough Park ahead of the High Holidays.”
“At Eichler’s Judaica, the mayor spoke with shoppers preparing for Rosh Hashanah and heard directly from community members about the issues facing the neighborhood and how the administration can best support its residents,” Raskin said.
“The mayor was grateful for the opportunity to wish everyone a shanah tovah and a happy and healthy new year,” the spokesman told JNS.
At the store, Mamdani met with Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Borough Park Jewish Community Council, as well as Rabbi Yaakov Landau and Hirsch Meir Traube, who owns the Borough Park Eichler’s store. The store is separately owned from the Eichler’s location in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood.
While Mamdani was at the store, a woman identified as Stephanie Benshimol called out to the mayor, “Stop the antisemitism! You have all the power to stop the antisemitism. I’m begging you to do it.”
Unidentified people tried to nudge her away from Mamdani.
Raskin told JNS that Benshimol does not live in Borough Park, and he disputed the suggestion that she was a shopper who happened upon the mayoral visit.
“She was not a shopper who was passing by,” Raskin told JNS. “She came directly to the shop.”
The City Hall spokesman told JNS that the Mamdani administration is “committed to ensuring Jewish New Yorkers can live openly, proudly and safely in every neighborhood of our city.”
“That commitment is reflected in the administration’s actions, including increasing hate-crime prevention investments by more than 800% and the expansion of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which will soon release the nation’s first-ever municipal plan to root out antisemitism,” he said.
The only Orthodox Jewish member of the New York City Council stormed out of the first meeting of the council’s new Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in April after Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, said that City Hall’s policy is not to define hate, including Jew-hatred. The director of the office under the prior mayor told JNS that the office was going in a “a new ideological direction.”
