On Friday night, Aug. 14, a man allegedly hit a 63-year-old woman and spat upon and heat-butted a 65-year-old security guard at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. Two days later, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani began a weeklong “planned vacation with his family in upstate New York,” according to City Hall.
JNS asked Jewish leaders in the city whether they thought that the mayor, who has been widely accused of fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, ought to have canceled his vacation to stand with Jewish New Yorkers after the attack at the synagogue and less than a month after a visibly Jewish man was stabbed near an Upper West Side synagogue by a man who, witnesses say, yelled “Allahu akbar.”
Anti-Jewish hate crimes surged in New York City by 182% in Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to January 2025. It has since dropped somewhat, but Jews remain very disproportionately targeted in the city.
Rabbi Etan Tokayer, of the Kingsway Jewish Center, an Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn, and president of the Rabbinical Council of America, told JNS that Mamdani going upstate for a week could be a good thing.
“Perhaps, a week away from this bully’s pulpit is the kindest gesture he can muster,” Tokayer told JNS.
“Everyone, even a mayor of the greatest city, deserves some rest and rejuvenation,” the rabbi said. “The real problem with Mayor Mamdani is his reckless use of incendiary language, his wanton disregard for the safety of the city’s Jewish residents and his shameless abdication of any semblance of responsibility.”
Inna Vernikov, a Jewish member of the New York City Council and a vocal critic of the mayor’s, told JNS that Mamdani should not have stayed in the city to make a stronger show of solidarity with Jewish New Yorkers.
“I think he should permanently stay far away from New York City, from politics and the Jewish community,” she said.
