New York Police Arrest Shirtless Man After Wig Theft, Child Attack, Knife Threats Against Jews in Crown Heights

Law enforcement in New York City arrested an unnamed individual alleged to have terrorized multiple Jewish residents in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights in Brooklyn.

Photos from the scene on Wednesday morning showed New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers leading away a skinny, shirtless man whose pants sagged down just above his knees. The images showed him handcuffed with bare feet and a report described him as riding a bicycle.

The man allegedly approached a Jewish mother and her children before stealing her wig (worn for religious observance) and hitting one of her children. He also reportedly yelled antisemitic slurs, punched a Jewish man, and threatened him with a knife before the NYPD and Crown Heights Shmira, a nonprofit Jewish security agency, arrested him.

The attacks came amidst a surge of antisemitic hate crimes in New York City following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks across southern Israel. Earlier this year, the NYPD released a report showing that for 2024, it counted 641 total hate crimes with 345 targeting Jews — an increase of 7 percent from 2023 and a staggering 54 percent of all hate crimes.

Antisemitic criminals in New York City have often chosen Crown Heights as their hunting ground for harassing or even assaulting Jews.

In November, for example, three men who hid their faces behind hoods and ski masks chose to stalk and rob a Hasidic man. Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit, said following the crime that his organization was “deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”

Other antisemitic attacks against Crown Heights Jews in 2024 included a failed robbery which devolved into a beating instead, an assault on a 13-year-old Jewish boy biking to school, a kidnapping attempt, and a stabbing.

Many of the incidents — including the most recent Wednesday attacks — have been acts of Black-on-Jewish crime, straining cross-cultural relations in the multi-ethnic New York borough. A 2022 report by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) identified Orthodox Jews as the group most targeted for hate crimes in the city with 69 percent of their attackers African American.

In an interview about the crime surge, former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) asked The Algemeiner in November, “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”

May 25 also saw an antisemitic protest led by an African American activist named Terrell Harper — also known as “Relly Rebel” — described by the Jewish security service Shomrim as “a known antisemitic agitator, accompanied by approximately 30 cohorts.” The group targeted the Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters during a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a prominent Hasidic leader. They waved signs attempting to link the Israel Defense Forces with the 2020 police death of George Floyd and broader indifference to global Black suffering. Law enforcement soon intervened to block off the protesters from the Jews attending the service.

While in previous decades fringe Black nationalist figures such as Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan fueled Black-Jewish antisemitism, today such celebrities as rapper and former billionaire Kanye West and his friend, far-right podcaster Candace Owens, have used their much larger platforms to promote radical ideologies and conspiracy theories targeting the Jewish people. In a June 24 interview with Piers Morgan, Owens declared, “I’d want my kids to go to jail before they fought for Israel.”

Another clash between protesters and law enforcement in Crown Heights occurred on April 28. A planned anti-Israel march through the neighborhood inspired a robust police counter-presence with officers dispersed among the activists.

Chabad-Lubavitch spokesperson Rabbi Motti Seligson described on X how others had come out to support their Jewish neighbors. “It was heartening to see scores of people, some Jewish and some not, who came to Crown Heights to protect the residents. These people weren’t looking for a fight. Some gathered in front of the synagogue at 770, others stood at strategic corners. Clearly this was not 1991,” he wrote.

Seligson concluded in reference to the Crown Heights race riot which took place from Aug. 19-21, 1991, and which EJewishPhilanthropy described as “widely considered the worst antisemitic riot in American history.”

The post New York Police Arrest Shirtless Man After Wig Theft, Child Attack, Knife Threats Against Jews in Crown Heights first appeared on Algemeiner.com.