Despite the reports, Crown Heights was humming with pedestrian traffic on Friday afternoon, with Hanukkah underway. Cars and vans playing songs in Yiddish rolled up Kingston Avenue, where families ran errands before sundown.
David Lahainy, a Torah student at the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters, said he had noticed more police officers in the neighborhood.
“We need more,” said Mr. Lahainy, who carried two bouquets of roses from a flower stand that is near a mural of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994 and led the Lubavitch Hasidic community based in Crown Heights.
Mr. Lahainy, 26, paraphrased the rabbi’s saying that although Jews should take care of themselves, they cannot live with fear and should trust God.
Anti-Semitic hate crime complaints have increased by 18 percent this year, according to data provided by the Police Department. The department received 214 anti-Semitic hate crime complaints as of Sunday — 32 more than in the same period last year.
“We take every one seriously, whether it’s one or eight,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said a news conference on Friday. “I would argue that one is too much.”
Moishe Mindick, a music and Judaism teacher who lives in Crown Heights, said he and his neighbors were taking action. Mr. Mindick, 31, belongs to a WhatsApp group of more than 90 people called Make Crown Heights Safe Again, which he said was organizing patrols in response to the incidents.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/nyregion/brooklyn-anti-semitic-attack.amp.html
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