A procession of more than 25,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday in defiance of a wave of anti-Semitism that’s rocked the borough in recent weeks.
“Today we are building bridges,” said Eric Goldstein, head of the United Jewish Appeal Federation, which helped organize the march. “Jews and Jews, Jews and no Jews, all people of goodwill together.”
City and state politicians including Mayor Bill De Blasio and Chirlane McCray, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General Letitia James, District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, and senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand joined marchers in the 1.5-mile journey to Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights from Manhattan’s Foley Square.
The march follows two recent attacks against Jewish Brooklynites, including an assault by two knife-wielding fiends against a teenage boy on a bus in Sheepshead Bay on New Year’s Eve. That attack was followed less than 24 hours later, when on New Years some goon punched a 22-year-old Hasidic man in the throat, while shouting anti-Semitic slurs on New Years Day.
The New Years assaults followed four prior assaults in Brooklyn coinciding with Hanukkah, which drew widespread condemnation from state and city officials, who increased police patrols in Jewish neighborhoods throughout the city.
And the wave of anti-Semitism has not been confined to Brooklyn. A Dec. 10 shootout at a kosher grocery store left five dead — including two victims hailing from Williamsburg — in Jersey City, while a machete rampage left five members of an ultra-Orthodox congregation in upstate Monsey suffering heinous wounds.
