Seven employees of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sued the city, the department and its equal employment opportunity director for allegedly discriminating against them by refusing to recognize a Jewish employee group and retaliating by probing the group’s leaders after they mourned Jews killed at Bondi Beach in Australia.
The lawsuit, which the National Jewish Advocacy Center filed on Nov. 10 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses department officials of denying the group, HINENU, access to a program that was available to other ethnic groups.
The city health department opened an “unfounded investigation” about statements from eight of the group leaders about Jew-hatred and terrorism, NJAC stated.
City health officials first refused to allow a Jewish employee resource group in July 2025, on the grounds, it said, that employee resource group “identity cannot be based on religious groups,” according to the complaint.
The group sought the same benefits that the department provides to six other ERGs, including an agency email account, internal web page and an annual budget of $5,000.
The department recognized a group for staff of Southwest Asian and North African ancestry, whose charter “encompasses multiple religious identities,” they allege.
The HINENU charter stated that it “will not engage in political advocacy, religious worship or religious instruction” and that it “is not organized to advance, oppose or practice any religion,” according to the complaint.
Alan Scheiner, of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the group is “not asking the agency to fund Jewish religious services.”
“That would be improper,” he said. “We’re asking them to recognize that Jews are an ethnicity, an ancestry, a cultural heritage, and allow us to celebrate that and associate according to that shared heritage.”
“They denied it under the assumption, which is false—and I think they know it’s false, actually, for reasons we allege in the complaint—that Jews are just a religion, and that any association of Jews is a religious association,” Scheiner told JNS.
The plaintiffs seek a court order requiring the New York City health department to recognize HINENU on equal terms with other employee groups and expunge the investigation from its records. They are also asking for damages and legal fees.
Six of the seven are Jewish and the seventh, Joanna Micius, has “a strong interest in Judaism,” according to Scheiner. Micius alleges that the department discriminated against her through her association with Jewish colleagues, he said. (Someone by the same name as Micius is identified on LinkedIn as a public health adviser at the city department.)
On Dec. 16, 2025, HINENU used its agency email account to send about 85 city employees a Chanukah message that mourned Jews killed two days prior at a Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.
The message quoted Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, senior rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, who said that “globalizing the intifada is a call to murder” and that “anti-Zionism kills Jews.”
The next day, HINENU appealed to senior department leaders for support. Within hours, Sye-Eun Ahn, the department’s equal employment opportunity director, ordered the group to “desist” from using its agency email account, according to the complaint.
The group held an online support session for employees, who were distressed by the attack, on Dec. 18.
The city health department then opened a nearly four-month investigation of eight of the group’s leaders for what it said was “racial and religious discrimination.”
Fourteen colleagues, most of whom neither got the email nor attended the support session, complained, the lawsuit alleges.
When investigators questioned the group’s leaders in April, they focused on the employees’ views about Zionism, Israel and the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
The sessions were “very reminiscent” of “struggle sessions, where the supposed offenders are harangued until they confess to having engaged in some type of political crime,” Scheiner told JNS.
One investigator asked if the Bondi Beach massacre was “an antisemitic attack or an anti-Zionist attack.” The person admitted that “I know it’s a loaded question,” the lawsuit alleges.
Another investigator questioned if quoting Steinmetz was “something that could be potentially inflammatory and something that strays a little different from creating a safe space.”
The city health department “didn’t at all recognize or support the grief of the Jews and also Israeli immigrants who work for the Department of Health,” Scheiner told JNS.
“They had no empathy for the feelings of the Jews about that horrific attack on Jews, who were trying to observe Chanukah at Bondi Beach in Australia,” he said.
The department closed the probes on June 24 and said that it was “unable to make findings,” because it could not adopt “a definitive interpretation of terms and slogans such as ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘globalize the intifada,’” per the lawsuit.
HINENU applied formally for recognition six days later. Ahn rejected the application on July 10, the lawsuit states.
The city employees contrasted the scrutiny of their statements with the department’s programming about Israel.
At a Feb. 3 workshop at the department’s headquarters, an agency official told more than 100 attendees that its “global oppression working group” had been “developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” according to the complaint.
Scheiner told JNS that the New York City health department “took up the cause of Israel’s enemies and adopted almost as an article of faith, or rather as policy of the Department of Health, that Israel was engaged in a genocide almost immediately after Oct. 7 occurred.”
The lawsuit alleges that the department’s treatment of HINENU reflects a broader city policy hostile to Jews under New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who appoints the health commissioner.
After recording a 182% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the Big Apple in January, in Mamdani’s first month as mayor, the city began publishing only “confirmed” hate crimes and not “reported” ones in February. That suggested a decline, although it was hard to compare 2026 statistics with those from 2025.
In March, the city said that it would publish both “confirmed” and “reported” statistics separately each month. The city provides a comparison between “confirmed” 2026 statistics and the prior year, but not of “reported” hate crimes.
The hate crime statistics that New York City released last week show that Jews, who make up about 10% of New Yorkers, were the targets of 57.8% of the hate crimes in the city last month, and of 52.6% of all hate crimes so far this year.
Some of the alleged conduct in the new lawsuit predates Mamdani’s tenure in City Hall, but “there is this strong link between the agency’s policy of denying Jewish peoplehood and the overall, we believe, policy of the city—antisemitic policy of the city—which is expressed primarily in the mayor’s relentless hostility to Israel,” Scheiner told JNS.
Plaintiffs “don’t have any direct evidence that City Hall knew of the denial of the employee resource group, or that they planned or knew of the event on Feb. 3, 2026,” Scheiner said.
But the “agency-wide lecture about the alleged evils of Israel” had “no connection to the work of the agency and yet consumed agency time and resources,” he told JNS.
Mamdani is partially responsible for an “antisemitic culture” that the health department adopted, according to Scheiner.
“Israel is only a tiny part of the population of the world, as are Jews, only a tiny fraction, less than 0.2% of the world,” he told JNS. “For that to be the singular, repetitive, pervasive focus of the agency is really quite remarkable.”
“To us, it’s obviously antisemitic, because it’s not a coincidence that Israel is the only Jewish state and Israel is the only foreign state that is subject to the ire of the city of New York’s executive and the Department of Health,” he said.
