Jewish FDNY Mayor-Elect Mamdani Condemns Swastika Spray-Painted On Jewish SchoolCommissioner Resigns Day After Mamdani Win

 

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) responded that “it’s not a coincidence” that New Yorkers discovered the antisemitic images the day after election results.

A swastika spray-painted in red on a window of Magen David Yeshivah in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 5, 2023. Credit: NYPD Hate Crimes.A swastika spray-painted in red on a window of Magen David Yeshivah in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 5, 2023. Credit: NYPD Hate Crimes.

(Nov. 5, 2025 / JNS)

While Jewish families across New York City were processing election results on Tuesday, vandals spray-painted multiple large red swastikas on the walls of Magen David Yeshivah, one of the largest Sephardic Jewish schools in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The New York Post reported that the suspect “wore all black” and “fled on foot.”

“Brooklyn’s Jewish community wakes up to two swastikas at Magen David Yeshivah in Gravesend,” representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) posted on social media, urging mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to condemn the graffiti.

City and national figures, including Republican Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, the Combat Antisemitism Movement and Joel Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel School District in Upstate New York, also linked the vandalism to Mamdani’s victory.

“It’s probably not a coincidence that Magen David Yeshivah was attacked with a swastika on the night of the Mamdani election, after they required that all applicants to their school be registered to vote,” Petlin said.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) condemned the graffiti as “a wake-up call that Mamdani is ushering in the pro-terrorist antisemitic takeover of NYC aided and abetted by the worst governor in America.” She also called on both Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to respond.

After Hochul issued a statement calling the graffiti a “hateful display of antisemitism,” Stefanik fired back, writing that the governor should “get your endorsed Communist antisemite to condemn.”

By midday on Wednesday, Mamdani released his own statement: “This is a disgusting and heartbreaking act of antisemitism, and it has no place in our beautiful city. As mayor, I will always stand steadfast with our Jewish neighbors to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city.”

Community WhatsApp groups in the Flatbush and Boro Park neighborhoods of Brooklyn reported finding more swastikas on Wednesday near a Jewish cemetery on McDonald Avenue; carved into the seat of a school bus for Orthodox Jewish children with special needs; and on a wall near the offices of Central Hatzalah.

New York Jewry Must Now Thread The Needle Of History

What will Jews in the city talk about in synagogue and at Shabbat tables for the next eight weeks until the inauguration of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani?

 

By Simmy Allen

(Nov. 5, 2025 / JNS)

Just five days before the 87th anniversary of the two-day pogrom on German and Austrian Jews and Jewish communities, known as Kristallnacht (Nov. 9-10, 1938), an eerily familiar feeling is being felt by the American Jewish consciousness following the disturbing election of Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor-elect of New York City. This sentiment begs the question: What’s going to be with the Jews?

The answer in 1938 was that the very people who had contributed for so many years to the advancement of Europe’s most enlightened society were no longer welcome. Generations of German and Austrian Jews, who once thrived in commerce, academia and public life, and who, for five years ignored the growing sentiment of Main Street and town halls across Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler, suddenly woke that November to the thunderous hammer-blow of national socialism. Jews were finally forced to acknowledge their precarious place in society, and, for most, it was too late to do anything about it.

Now, less than a century later, the verdict is not as clear. One thing remains certain: We are forced to face the same, albeit nuanced form, of hatred. An antisemitic riptide has caught us in the electoral wake. For years in the United States, we have been seeing it resurface as clear as the stereotypical crooked nose on a Der Stürmer caricature, albeit this time thinly veiled behind a rhetoric of “anti-Zionism.”

So when New York City—the self-styled Jewish capital of the Diaspora—elected a Socialist, antisemitic mayor, the question must be asked: What will the Jewish community do now?

I speak from the vantage of someone who was born and raised in New York City. I attended a Jewish day school in New York and graduated from a City University of New York school. I was a proud Jewish New Yorker who wore my yarmulke freely on the streets of Manhattan, marched in the Salute to Israel Day Parade, and attended Jewish heritage days in Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium without fear of attack. But now, that identity is called into question because I no longer feel welcome in the Big Apple.

Thankfully, I made aliyah with my family years ago. Still, many of my family members and friends, and thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of proud Jews, including thousands of Holocaust survivors, remain in the city. My question at this historic crossroad is: Will they receive the wake-up call that our German grandparents got on Nov. 9, 1938, or will the New York Jewish shtetl bury its collective head in the East River and pretend that New York is still their home?

What will Jews in New York talk about in synagogues and at Shabbat tables for the next eight weeks until the Jan. 1 inauguration of mayor-elect Mamdani? Will rabbinical sermons preach aliyah or yeridah, a Hebrew expression meaning “going down,” bound for Florida? Or will they just plead with God to split the waters (this time of the Hudson tidal estuary), so they can cross to its western bank, for relocation to towns like Teaneck or Englewood in New Jersey with large Jewish populations?

Perhaps our fearless leaders will proactively call for aggressive letter-writing campaigns and public rallies aimed at transforming City Hall and Gracie Mansion.

But maybe, just maybe, contemporary American Jewry has taken another lesson from recent history—thinking that everything will be OK and that Jan. 2, 2026, will come and go, and it will be business as usual. One thing’s for certain: This is a moment that demands reflection and action on the part of the Jewish community. Is it too late?

Simmy Allen is the director of communications for the Yael Foundation.