New York (AP), a woman from Brooklyn, said she was afraid of her life while she was chased, Ritana, spitting and crashed with objects from a crowd of Orthodox Jews, who incorrectly confused her as a protest against Israel’s final security minister.
The attack, recorded by an observer, unfolded on Thursday near the World Headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch at Crown Heights, where the appearance of Itar Ben-Gvir began clashes between propalist activists and members of the Great Orthodox Jewish Community of the neighborhood.
The woman, a resident of the neighborhood of her 30s, told the Associated Press that she learned about the protest after hearing a police helicopters over her apartment. She went to investigate around 10:30 am, but until then the protest was paid mostly. She didn’t want to be filmed, she covered her face with a scarf.
“As I took out my scarf, a group of 100 men appeared immediately and surrounded me,” said the woman, who was talking to the AP on condition of anonymity because she was afraid of her safety.
“There was nowhere to go”
“They called me, threatening to rape me, chanting the” death of the Arabs. ” I thought the police would protect me from the mafia, but they did nothing to intervene, “she said.
As the chants grew with intensity, a lone policeman tried to accompany her to safety. They were followed for blocks of hundreds of men and boys who gather in Hebrew and English.
The video shows two of the men who kick her in the back, another throwing cone in her head and a fourth pushed garbage into her.
“This is America,” one of the men can be heard. “We have Israel. Now we have an army.”
At one point, she and the policeman were almost an angle against a building, the video shows.
“I felt pure horror,” the woman recalls. “At that moment I realized that I couldn’t take this crowd of men to my home. There was nowhere to go. I didn’t know what to do. I was just terrible.”
After a few blocks, the officer confused the woman into a police vehicle, prompting a man to shout, “Take her!” The crowd burst out of cheers when it was expelled.
The woman, a life -long New Yorker, said she was left with bruising and mentally shaken by the episode, which she said police should investigate as an act of hatred.
“I’m afraid to move around the neighborhood where I’ve lived for a decade,” she told AP. “It doesn’t seem that someone in any position of power is really interested.”
Investigation
A police spokesman said one person was arrested and five others were issued after the demonstration, but did not say whether anyone involved in the attack on the woman was accused.
Mayor Eric Adams said on Sunday that police were investigating “a series of incidents arising from protests on Thursday, which began when a group of anti-Israel protesters surrounded the World Headquarters of Chabad Lubavic-Jewish Home for worship.”
He said the police had talked to a different woman on the propalist side of the protest who had suffered injury after being harassed by counter -protesters. Photos, shared online, showed that a woman with blood flowing on the face.
“Let me be clear: none of this is acceptable, it’s actually contemptuous,” Adams added. “New York will always be a place where people can protest peacefully, but we will not tolerate violence, violate, threatening or threatening.”
The protest was one of several in recent days against Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist settler leader, who embarked on his first state visit to the United States after joining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet three years ago.
Earlier in Israel for racist incitement and support for a terrorist group, he called on his supporters to face the Palestinians and to defend the “Jewish power”.
The protest against the emergence of Ben-Gvir Brooklyn gave rise to condemned by some Jewish groups who accused participants of targeting a religious object.
Chabad-Lubavic condemns an incident
The neighborhood around Chabad’s headquarters was also the place of Crown Heights Riot in 1991, in which the black residents, outraged by the boy’s death in a crash involving Rabbi’s motorcycle, attacked Jews, homes and businesses for three days.
A spokesman for Chabad-Lubavic, Rabbi Motti Seligson, condemned both protesters against Ben-Gvir and the mafia that chases the woman.
“The violent provocateurs who called for the Jews’ genocide in support of terrorists and terrorism – outside the Synagogue, in a Jewish neighborhood, where some of the oldest anti -Semitic violence in American history was committed – do this to intimidate, to provoke and to cast fear.”
“We condemn the harsh language and the violence of the small detached group of young people; such actions are completely unacceptable and completely antithetic to the values of the Torah. The fact that possibly an unprecedented observer got into the melee further emphasizes the question,” he said.