A 13-year-old Jewish boy was slapped in the face on his way to school in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn on Monday, prompting outrage amongst New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community at the city’s lack of action against rising antisemitism in the area.
Local Jewish leader Yaacov Behrman posted on X that the boy had been “riding his bike between Winthrop and Clarkson, near the hospital, when a man slapped him,” adding that “he arrived at school shaken.”
It keeps happening—another attack.
— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) November 4, 2024
A 13-year-old Jewish boy from Crown Heights was slapped in the face on his way to school this morning at approximately 8 a.m. He was riding his bike between Winthrop and Clarkson, near the hospital, when a man slapped him. He arrived at school…
According to multiple accounts cited by NYC-based newspaper Algemeiner, the assailant was a black male.
Behrman, who is a liaison for Chabad Headquarters, the main New York hub for the Hasidic movement, said the school contacted the boy’s parents as well as Crown Heights Shomrim, a neighbourhood patrol organisation that also monitors local antisemitism. Behrman also noted that the boy had filed a police report.
The incident marks the second assault on an Orthodox Jewish person in the Brooklyn neighbourhood in just a week, after a 30-year-old Jewish man was slashed in the face by an assailant last Tuesday.
“I’m fuming to the point I’ve got a migraine… You have kids who are 13 or 14 and have grown up with the attitude of ‘if you get assaulted in the street, just take it because nothing is gonna be done’,” Yisraeli Eliashiv, a teacher of the boy who was assaulted on Monday, told Algemeiner. “Those are the symptoms not of a sick but of a dead and decaying society.:
Eliashiv added that the assailant, who remains at large, “smacked [the boy] across the face for no reason other than hate. Thankfully, he got away before anything else happened.”
According to Algemeiner, Eliashiv noted that his student did not initially think to notify the police because he did not believe the assailant would receive any punishment.
Crown Heights is home to a significant portion of the New York Jewish community, with Hasidic Jews representing roughly 25 per cent of the neighbourhood’s population. It has also been the site of numerous crimes against Jewish residents in recent months, with over 385 antisemitic hate crimes taking place in the area since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, according to a review of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) hate crimes data.
