A 35-year-old man was stabbed on Tuesday near the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in what the police are investigating as a possible hate crime.
The police on Wednesday were seeking a man they believed was responsible for the assault, which they said appeared to take place after the man made antisemitic comments.
In a social media post on Tuesday night, Mayor Eric Adams said that “evil, hateful, antisemitic violence” must end. “We cannot let this hate persist in our city, and we will never back down,” he wrote.
The victim, whose name has not been released by the police, was walking that afternoon near the intersection of Kingston Avenue and Lincoln Place, around the corner from the Chabad building, when an unidentified man approached and the two exchanged words in a “seemingly random” interaction.
The unidentified man walked away, and the 35-year-old followed him down the block, the police said. The two then got into a verbal altercation that turned violent, the police said. At some point in their fighting, the man pulled out a knife and stabbed the 35-year-old in the chest. The victim proceeded to follow the man across the street and down another block before the attacker fled.
During the disputes, the unidentified man had made “anti-Jewish statements,” the police said. It was not immediately clear what those statements were.
Emergency medical workers took the 35-year-old victim to a hospital, where he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries and released.
The police said the altercation was being investigated by the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force and that dozens of officers had been deployed to the Crown Heights area after the stabbing to search for the attacker.
The violence took place in the heart of an Orthodox area, just steps from the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a globe-spanning sect of Hasidic Judaism. The stabbing came days after two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. The terror attack killed 15 people, including a Holocaust survivor and one of the event’s organizers, Rabbi Eli Schlanger of the Chabad of Bondi.
The mass shooting on the first night of the holiday sent a shock of anxiety through Jewish communities abroad and in New York City who have been contending with a recent rise in antisemitic attacks. Antisemitic hate crimes have risen sharply in the United States since 2021, including attacks in Boulder, Colo., and Washington this year.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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