A Brooklyn elementary school has become an epicenter of hatred since anti-Israel protesters started holding “vigils” on and around the property, spreading antisemitic literature and harassing Jewish neighbors, The Post has learned.
The rallies by PS 139 Families for Palestine, scheduled every Sunday from 11 a.m. to noon at or next to the Flatbush school have sparked fears that such actions will incite hatred and violence against Jews — especially since the cold-blooded murders this week of two young Israeli Embassy aides in Washington D.C.
“It endangers Jewish lives, and embeds bigotry into the fabric of our educational system,” said Tova Plaut, a city pre-K coordinator and activist against antisemitism in NYC public schools. “It ensures that hatred of Jews takes root in the hearts of our youth.”
“Everybody has a right to protest, but to use New York City school property to do that is wrong,” said the uncle of a student at the Rugby Road school.
“They hate Jews,” he said of the group. “If you’re Jewish, it’s automatically assumed you’re pro-Israel and pro-war.”
Flatbush/Midwood is home to 33,000 Jewish adults and 12,000 Jewish children in 19,000 households, a 2023 survey by the UJA Federation estimated.
A ringleader of the PS 139 group is Cindy Gorn, a parent association member who was accused of assaulting two NYPD lieutenants at an anti-police protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in 2014 when she was a grad student at Columbia University, sources said.
The group began holding weekly vigils in January at the school. The school playground is open to the community on weekends.
Claiming not to speak on behalf of the school, the PS 139 families have invited others to join their efforts, posting on social media, “We hope more and more of our fellow PS139 families and neighbors join us,” and, “Not at PS 139 but interested in starting a group at your school? We can help!”
Photos shared with The Post show the group meeting on the PS 139 playground — an apparent violation of the NYC chancellor’s rules against using schools for political activities — and at a public “Tot Lot” playground across the street.
On Mother’s Day, “I saw them parading around the schoolyard, posting written materials on the fence and handing them out to people watching their children play,” said Naomi Cohn, a lawyer who lives on the block and started the Facebook group Zionist Brooklyn.
At that vigil, a PS 139 parent threatened a Jewish neighbor, saying, “We know your name” and “We know where you live,” a witness said.
At another event, an attendee snapped “get out of here” at a Jewish woman filming the gathering, while another member accused the woman of touching her baby, footage obtained by The Post shows.
Last month, the group donated works of anti-Israel authors to be raffled at the PS 139 Parent Association’s annual auction.
For $5, participants had a chance to win “Forest of Noise,” by Mosab Abu Toha, a 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning author accused of denying Oct. 7 atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists. Toha reportedly disparaged Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas and doubted the torture they endured.
Also donated was “Mornings in Jenin” by Susan Abulhawa, who ranted in a speech last month that words like “extermination, holocaust, depravity” were not big enough to capture “Israeli terrorism.”
The books included “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappe, a historian critics have blasted as an “anti-Semitic ideologue who seeks to delegitimize and demonize Israel,” and “P is for Palestine,” a controversial alphabet book for kids that uses “intifada” for the letter “I.”
The activist group has raised several thousand dollars through one of its members’ Venmo accounts, claiming on Instagram the cash was for relatives of a PS 139 family in Gaza.
Last month, PS 139 Families for Palestine demanded that schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos recant an apology for a “Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit” linked in a DOE newsletter.
Weeks later, the group partnered with the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace and Palestinian Assembly for Liberation to try to cancel a luncheon at a Flatbush Reform synagogue for American Friends of Unit 669, a group that supports the Israeli Air Force’s elite evacuation and rescue unit.
“We made it clear — no genocide propaganda or fundraising in our neighborhood,” they declared on Instagram.
Outraged Jewish advocates denounced the activities as “incitement disguised as community activism.”
“We are alarmed and heartbroken by the unauthorized and inflammatory use of your school’s identity by a group calling itself ‘139 for Palestine,’” they wrote in a letter emailed to PS 139 Principal Tamika Harding, Aviles-Ramos and elected officials. Harding did not return a request for comment.
The group violated Chancellor’s Regulations prohibiting the use of city DOE resources, names or properties for political activities, and fundraising by outside groups in association with a DOE school, the letter charged.
“When a school’s name is used to amplify hate, the damage cuts deeper than protocol — it cuts into identity, safety, and the very fabric of community,” it said.
They demanded that the school and DOE disavow the group.
The DOE insisted the group is not affiliated with PS 139, aside from parents who may have children attending the school.
Officials did not indicate whether the group would be banned from meeting on school grounds, saying only “they cannot protest on school grounds during school hours and cannot block any entrances or egresses.”
“As soon as we were alerted of this incident, we engaged with this group to inform them of the rules, and they have now removed ‘PS’ from their materials,” a DOE spokesperson told The Post.
The group, which calls itself PS Families for Palestine on its Instagram page, did not reply to an email seeking comment. Gorn did not return calls.
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