NEW YORK — A Brooklyn woman said she feared for her life as she was chased, kicked, spit at and pelted with objects by a mob of Orthodox Jewish men who mistook her as a participant in a protest against Israel’s far-right security minister.
The assault, recorded by a bystander, unfolded Thursday near the global headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Crown Heights, where an appearance by Itamar Ben-Gvir set off clashes between pro-Palestinian activists and members of the neighborhood’s large Orthodox Jewish community.
The woman, a neighborhood resident in her 30s, told The Associated Press she learned of the protest after hearing police helicopters over her apartment. She walked over to investigate around 10:30 p.m. but by then the protest had mostly disbursed. Not wanting to be filmed, she covered her face with a scarf.
“As soon as I pulled up my scarf, a group of 100 men came over immediately and encircled me,” said the woman, who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety.
“They were shouting at me, threatening to rape me, chanting ‘death to Arabs.’ I thought the police would protect me from the mob, but they did nothing to intervene,” she said.
As the chants grew in intensity, a lone police officer tried to escort her to safety. They were followed for blocks by hundreds of men and boys jeering in Hebrew and English.
Video shows two of the men kicking her in the back, another hurling a traffic cone into her head and a fourth pushing a trash can into her.
“This is America,” one of the men can be heard saying. “We got Israel. We got an Army now.”
At one point, she and the police officer were nearly cornered against a building, the video shows.
“I felt sheer terror,” the woman recalled. “I realized at that point that I couldn’t lead this mob of men to my home. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t know what to do. I was just terrified.”
After several blocks, the officer hustled the woman into a police vehicle, prompting one man to yell, “Get her!” The crowd erupted in cheers as she was driven away.
The woman, a lifelong New Yorker, said she was left with bruises and mentally shaken by the episode, which she said police should investigate as an act of hate.
“I’m afraid to move around the neighborhood where I’ve lived for a decade,” she told the AP. “It doesn’t seem like anyone in any position of power really cares.”
A police spokesperson said one person was arrested and five others were issued summons following the demonstration, but did not say whether anyone involved in assaulting the woman was charged.
Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday that police were investigating “a series of incidents stemming from clashing protests on Thursday that began when a group of anti-Israel protesters surrounded the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters — a Jewish house of worship — in Brooklyn.”
He said police had spoken to a different woman on the pro-Palestinian side of the protest who suffered injuries after she was harassed by counter-protesters. Photos shared online showed that woman with blood streaming down her face.
“Let me be clear: None of this is acceptable, in fact, it is despicable,” Adams added. “New York City will always be a place where people can peacefully protest, but we will not tolerate violence, trespassing, menacing, or threatening.”
The protest was one of several in recent days against Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist settler leader who is embarking on his first U.S. state visit since joining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet three years ago.
Previously convicted in Israel of racist incitement and support for a terrorist group, he has called on his supporters to confront Palestinians and assert “Jewish Power.”
The protest against Ben-Gvir’s Brooklyn appearance generated condemnations from some Jewish groups, who accused participants of targeting a religious site.
The neighborhood around the Chabad headquarters also was the site of the 1991 Crown Heights riot, in which Black residents outraged by boy’s death in a crash involving a rabbi’s motorcade attacked Jews, homes and businesses for three days.
A Chabad-Lubavitch spokesman, Rabbi Motti Seligson, denounced both the anti-Ben-Gvir protesters and the mob that chased the woman.
“The violent provocateurs who called for the genocide of Jews in support of terrorists and terrorism — outside a synagogue, in a Jewish neighborhood, where some of the worst antisemitic violence in American history was perpetrated, and where many residents share deep bonds with the victims of Oct 7 — did so in order to intimidate, provoke, and instill fear,” Seligson said.
“We condemn the crude language and violence of the small breakaway group of young people; such actions are entirely unacceptable and wholly antithetical to the Torah’s values. The fact that a possibly uninvolved bystander got pulled into the melee further underscores the point,” he said.
