A man has been charged with a hate crime after allegedly stabbing a Jewish man near the Chabad Hasidic movement’s headquarters in Brooklyn in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Vincent Sumpter, 22, allegedly shouted “Free Palestine” and “Do you want to die?” at the victim before stabbing him during Shabbat near the intersection of Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights.
The location is near 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad’s world headquarters, an area heavily populated by Orthodox Jews.
Sumpter has been charged with eight felonies, including assault as a hate crime, for the incident, according to an arrest report.
Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, a spokesperson for Chabad, said the incident took place around 2 a.m. on Saturday. The victim, a member of the Chabad community, was transported to a hospital and is expected to be released within two days, Behrman said in a statement posted on X.
Bystanders chased down the attacker and detained him until police made an arrest, Behrman said.
Video released by Crown Heights Shmira, a neighborhood watch group, showed two men dressed in Hasidic attire confronting a man with a backpack on a sidewalk. The man with the backpack then thrusts his arm several times at the chest of one of the Jewish men, who staggers backward. The video does not include any recorded audio.
The victim, Yechiel Dabrowskin, told Israeli’s KAN public broadcaster that he had been with friends at a Shabbat event when someone said, “There’s someone outside threatening kids.”
“I told him to go away,” Dabrowskin said in Hebrew in an interview from his hospital bed. “Suddenly he pulled out a pocket knife.”
Dabrowskin said he had been stabbed four centimeters away from his heart and had undergone surgery.
An online fundraiser for Dabrowskin, who is Israeli and came to Crown Heights to study in a yeshiva there, raised more than $20,000 within a day of the attack.
The UJA-Federation of New York said in a statement that it was “horrified by this senseless hate crime.” The Anti-Defamation League said it was in touch with law enforcement over the incident.
Increase in hate crimes
Behrman and others tied the incident to pro-Palestinian rhetoric that has been widespread in New York City since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and initiated an ongoing war in Gaza.
“Take this incident as a warning of the potential consequences if such hateful rhetoric continues,” Behrman said in his statement. “When hate and incitement against a group are preached, it invariably leads to violence.”
Mark Treyger, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, also connected the assault to recent trends in the city.
“This is a dangerous escalation of the current climate we are in and it should outrage every New Yorker because it is an attack on every New Yorker,” Treyger tweeted. “This abhorrent and abominable attack on a young Jewish person in Brooklyn because of his identity should not and cannot be seen in isolation.”
Antisemitism has spiked in New York City since Oct. 7, with hundreds of incidents reported to police in the past 10 months. In July, there were 30 antisemitic incidents reported to police, three times higher than the 10 incidents reported during the same month last year.
Jews have been targeted in reported hate crimes more than all other groups combined almost every month in the past year.
Several post-Oct. 7 incidents are being pursued by prosecutors, including one in which a suspect allegedly punched a Jewish Israeli near Times Square while shouting antisemitic epithets in mid-October. In another incident, in April, a man was charged with a number of hate crimes after aiming his car at Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.
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