New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s visit to Eichler’s Judaica store in Borough Park on Wednesday was an “embarrassment” that allowed him to portray himself as an ally of Jews while continuing to promote anti-Israel views, Inna Vernikov, a Jewish member of the New York City Council, told JNS.
The mayor, whose visit to Borough Park was disrupted by an irate customer at the store, wrote on social media on Thursday night that “the month of Elul,” the introspective Jewish month leading up to the High Holidays, “invites us to pause, look inward and set our intentions for the year ahead.”
Mamdani said he “was grateful to spend time with residents preparing to carry forward traditions passed down through generations and to listen to their hopes, concerns and priorities for their community.”
“Every New Yorker deserves a government that listens, shows up and delivers public excellence,” he wrote.
At the store, Mamdani met with Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Borough Park Jewish Community Council, Rabbi Yaakov Landau and Hirsch Meir Traube, who owns the Borough Park Eichler’s store. The store is separately owned from the Eichler’s store in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood.
The mayor was shown Rosh Hashanah traditions, including the sounding of the shofar.
Every Jew who helped “stage” the mayor’s “photo op allowed the mayor to keep selling a lie that one can be an ally of the Jewish people while denying the basic reality of Judaism,” according to Vernikov, a Ukrainian-born Republican who represents Brooklyn’s 48th District.
“The question is not whether the mayor of New York is allowed to walk into a shop,” she said. “The question is who invited him into the heart of our community and why anyone thought that was an honor.”
“Courtesy to the office of the mayor is one thing,” Vernikov told JNS. “Drawing a crowd, though very modest for a community that usually flocks to comparable events, presenting gifts, using religious objects and treating him like an honored guest is another.”
“It’s an embarrassment and disservice to the majority of Jewish New Yorkers who did not vote for him, including roughly 85% of Borough Park,” she said.
Mamdani’s post was accompanied by pictures of his visit, which came amid elevated levels of antisemitism in the city.
New York City Police Department data released on Thursday showed that Jews were targeted in 19, or 42%, of the city’s 45 confirmed hate crimes in August. The number was down from 22 anti-Jewish hate crimes in August 2025, although such crimes were up 8% year to date compared with the same period last year.
‘Poor judgment’
Vernikov, who has been a fierce critic of the mayor, told JNS that “by welcoming Mamdani into a Jewish space as if he were safe, we tell Jews to lower their guard and tell everyone else that our concerns are overblown. They are not.”
During Mamdani’s first month in office, “antisemitic incidents spiked far more sharply still,” 182% in fact, she said. “Our people are assaulted, our streets desecrated with vile graffiti and our shuls protested. ”
Traub, of Eichler’s, displayed “poor judgment” in welcoming the mayor to his store, Vernikov said. She noted that he also owns Menucha Publishers and Targum Press, two “major” publishers of “Torah literature that goes into our homes, yeshivas and shuls.”
Traub posted a video on Thursday night in which he fervently denied inviting the mayor.
“None of the videos you’ve seen going around have anything to do with any of the Eichler’s staff,” he said. “We have not participated in any of the gifting, welcoming and all that.”
Eichler’s has welcomed elected officials and political candidates from across the spectrum for decades and does not “take any political sides” as a business, Traub said.
If community rabbis or Agudath Israel of America were to “tell us otherwise not to welcome, not accept anyone, we will for sure do that,” he said. “But as a business owner, I do not have the capacity or the shoulders to take any political sides or to turn the business into a political field.”
During the visit, a customer identified as Stephanie Benshimol hollered at Mamdani to “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.
“All you’re doing is focusing on Israel and bringing more hate to the Jewish people,” Benshimol said.
Traub denied that his people had anything to do with removing Benshimol from the shop.
“We weren’t involved in kicking anyone out of the store,” he said. “We do support Israel. Am Yisrael Chai.”
‘He plays the ally’
Mamdani has been harshly critical of Israel and has taken steps to distance the city government from some Israel-related partnerships.
On his first day in office, Mamdani revoked an order by former Mayor Eric Adams adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. In May, he also boycotted the annual Israel Day parade.
His contact with the Jewish community has largely come from progressive and anti-Zionist factions and organizations, and he has dismissed calls to tone down his rhetoric by those who claim it is leading to more attacks on, and threats against, Jews in the city.
Mamdani has “built a political career on attacking the Jewish state,” Vernikov told JNS.
“When he is not libeling Israel, threatening to jail its prime minister or denying the Jewish people’s historical connection to our homeland, including Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, he plays the ally by surrounding himself with carefully curated Jewish symbols that omit Israel,” she said.
“Always with that wide Cheshire cat smile that says ‘look how warm I am, while I spend the rest of the year mainstreaming hatred of your people,’” she said. “All in the name of ‘progressive values,’ of course.”
Vernikov told JNS that she sees parallels between Mamdani’s approach to antisemitism and the practices of the Soviet Union, where she was born.
“It is not an accident that Mamdani loudly condemns old-fashioned antisemitism while permitting, and often promoting, the left-wing anti-Zionism version that has driven violence against Jews across this city and this country,” she said. “The Soviet Union did the same thing. The Communists even made ‘antisemitism’ a crime on paper.”
“Did anyone believe the USSR was a safe haven for Jews and Judaism?” she said. “I grew up there. I know the difference between a slogan and safety.”
Vernikov acknowledged that many Jews in Borough Park do not identify as Zionists but said that opposition to Zionism within parts of the Orthodox community should not be equated with anti-Zionism from outside the Jewish community.
“There is no festival on our calendar that is not bound to our ancestral homeland,” she said. “We are called the People of Yisrael. Many of the Torah’s mitzvot can only be in the Land of Israel. The very way we daven,” or pray, “today was set in Jerusalem.”
Vernikov cited the late Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a fierce opponent of political Zionism, who she said taught that fervent anti-Zionist non-Jews “hate the Jewish people.”
“Mamdani fits the Rebbe’s description of this type of non-Jew to a T,” she said.
“Look at the company he keeps,” she said. “The ‘love of his life’ liked posts celebrating Oct. 7, the day it happened, which would have included slaughtering the Jews at the Kotel had Hamas gotten as far as they wanted.”
“Bringing such an individual into our community so close to the yahrtzeit of those murdered Jews is a mockery of their memory,” she said.
The visit sets “the wrong example” for the Jewish community,” she told JNS.
“We should not accept the mayor’s paper-thin, conditional solidarity,” she said. “We should not settle for a mayor who will pose with a Jewish religious item so long as no one makes him say the word Jerusalem without adding ‘capital of Palestine.’”
Mamdani treats “cultural appropriation as a cardinal sin, then does it to the Jews on an industrial scale,” she added.
“He treats our holiest days like interchangeable cultural décor, draining them of all historic meaning until nothing is left but an empty smile and a generic word about ‘resilience,’” she said.
The blowing of the shofar, “a custom interlaced with our historical connection to the land of Israel,” is one example, she said.
“Blowing the shofar has another meaning I think is relevant—to ‘awaken slumbering souls that have grown complacent,’” she told JNS. “To Jews who have still not been paying attention, now might be a good time to start.”
