
The Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti on Friday, in an incident being investigated by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.
“Palestine” was scrawled on the wall of the building located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, under the biblical verse “How great are your tents O Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel” (Numbers 24:5), and directly under the word “Israel.”
No arrests have been made in the incident, which City Councilmember Julie Menin, a former congregant, described in an X post on Friday as a “vile antisemitic act.” Menin continued: “A house of worship is a sanctuary. Defacing it is an attack on all of us.”
The shul, which has a membership of more than 1,700 households, posted to its Instagram account that its congregants are “disheartened” by the vandalism and are investigating, assuring that “the synagogue building is secure” and wishing everyone Shabbat Shalom.
The shul’s Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove said in shul on Friday night, “It’s actually with a heavy heart that we begin Shabbat services tonight. … The facility is OK, we are all safe, and it is shocking and it is distressing.”
According to Cosgrove, a crowd gathered outside of the historic shul, founded in 1882 by German Jews, to show solidarity following the incident.
The number of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents has risen sharply across New York City since Hamas started the current war with the Jewish state on Oct. 7.
Last week, an anti-Israel group defaced the homes of the Brooklyn Museum’s director and board members and a mob of pro-Hamas protesters chanting “Intifada revolution” rallied outside an exhibit memorializing the hundreds of victims of the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel.
Also last week, masked agitators on a city subway car demanded to know if there were any “Zionists” on board. The group then warned, “This is your chance to get out,” according to a video circulating on social media. JNS
It is a Conservative Temple.
For the record:
This place is at most a synagogue. Not a Shul. It’s a conservative place with online services on “Saturday”. AND one or two female “Rabbis”
We’re all in this together …. It I suggest we reserve the term “shul” to an orthodox congregation; this congregation is Conservative, and among other things has video recordings done on Shabbos and has online services on Shabbos. None of this should detract from the outrage we should all feel for our brethren who have begun to experience the antisemitism experienced by Orthodox Jews for decades.
Why do religious Jewish people in New York think that the Goyim are going to be on your side? This isn’t the era of Italian immigrants who tolerated Jews in public, this is the era of Anglo-Saxon citizens and Pakistani student visa holders who hate Israel and the Jewish people. American cities aren’t safe anymore.