On Wednesday evening, a mob of Palestine activists stormed the entrance to Park East Synagogue in Manhattan. The crowd chanted, “Death, death to the IDF,” “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” and “Resistance, you make us proud. Take another settler out.” One agitator repeated, “We need to make them scared.”
The head rabbi of the synagogue, Arthur Schneier, is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor who was born in Vienna in 1930. He has vivid memories of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis rampaged throughout Germany and Austria attacking Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes, injuring and killing Jews in a horrific pogrom. “Now, he gets to see the same human material that shattered the glass of synagogues in Berlin and Vienna in 1938, outside his own synagogue,” another New York rabbi, Elchanan Poupko, observed on X.
One might think that this would be a fairly easy call for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. He could have simply stated the obvious: that no one should be shouting at Americans on their way to a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple to practice the religious liberty the Founders promised all of us. He could have taken a page from outgoing mayor Eric Adams, who said on X: “When you desecrate one house of worship, you desecrate them all.”
Instead, Mamdani offered an alarming equivocation. His spokesperson, Dora Pekec, on Thursday said: “The mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
By insinuating that Park East Synagogue was violating international law, Mamdani was laundering the lies and libel of a hate group.
Allow us to repeat that last phrase: “These sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
What violation of international law could possibly be happening in a synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on a weeknight in November? What war crimes could the families gathered there be committing?
