A 22-year-old Brooklyn man was arrested after allegedly stabbing a visibly Jewish man near a synagogue in the Crown Heights neighborhood early Saturday morning. Police and the victim both said the assailant yelled “Free Palestine” before the attack.
“At 2 a.m., they were saying that there was a person outside who was threatening children and teenagers,” stabbing victim Yechiel Dabrowskin told Israeli Public Broadcasting channel Kan 11. “I heard him say ‘Free Palestine,’ ‘You want to die?’ [and] I asked him to leave. When you look at the footage, you can see that me and a friend of mine were trying to distance him from us. All of a sudden, he pulled out a knife.”
The assailant, identified as Vincent Sumpter, then slashed his victim in the stomach, Dabrowskin said, causing internal bleeding.
“The knife went very close to my heart,” Dabrowskin told the outlet. “We all tackled him, and we all called the police.”
The attack occurred near the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters and is the latest in a series of attacks against Jewish residents of the borough — and of a spate of violence against Jews in the West.
Mark Treyger, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, wrote in a post on X on Saturday that the stabbing must be understood as part of a broader trend.
“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 wrote. “The abhorrent and abominable attack on a young Jewish person in Brooklyn because of his identity should not and cannot be seen in isolation.”
Treyger offered examples of conduct leading up to the attack, including “chanting Zionists are not welcome here across New York’s college campuses,” “Hunting for Jews inside of a NYC subway,” “Throwing smoke bombs at a Nova exhibit in Lower Manhattan where young people were trying to turn their pain into purpose after witnessing their peers slaughtered and abducted,” and “Targeting and vandalizing the homes of museum and college administrators to disassociate Jewish identity from everyday life.”
“In addition to ensuring the person responsible for this horrific and heinous stabbing is held fully accountable, the serious moment we are in requires a comprehensive plan to confront the astronomical tidal wave of antisemitism bearing down on New York,” Treyger continued. “As previously mentioned, antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. This visceral hate will impose more harm, including to other groups of people, if left unchecked.”