A woman was charged with federal hate crimes on Wednesday after prosecutors said she stabbed two Jewish men with a sharp object in Midtown Manhattan last week.
On Oct. 21, the woman, Anna Mochalova, approached a man on West 47th Street who was wearing the traditional attire worn by Orthodox Jewish men, federal prosecutors said in a letter to a judge. The man, who had a beard, then felt the sensation of a needle prick in his lower back and watched Ms. Mochalova walk past him, prosecutors said.
Then, two blocks away, Ms. Mochalova approached two more Jewish men who were both wearing skullcaps, according to prosecutors. Ms. Mochalova bumped into one of them multiple times and then stabbed him on his forearm with a sharp object, prosecutors said.
She then asked the other man whether he was Jewish, prosecutors said. The man, who is Jewish, replied that he was Muslim. Ms. Mochalova apologized and fled the scene, prosecutors said.
Jessica S. Tisch, the police commissioner, said in a statement that Ms. Mochalova had “attacked two visibly Jewish New Yorkers.”
“A hate crime is a message written in violence, and this defendant’s message was loud and clear,” Ms. Tisch said in the statement.
Ms. Mochalova, 32, was originally arrested on Oct. 24 and charged by state prosecutors with hate crimes. She was initially held at Rikers Island but has since been moved to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The Legal Aid Society, which is representing Ms. Mochalova in court, declined to comment.
The charges come as hate crimes in New York City have risen 13 percent through the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period last year, according to the Police Department. More than half of the confirmed hate crimes were anti-Jewish, according to the department.
It was not the first time that Ms. Mochalova, who was born in Russia, had attacked Jewish New Yorkers, according to federal prosecutors.
In June 2025, she was arrested after she approached a Jewish man outside a yeshiva in Brooklyn, yanked his phone away and threw it on the ground. Ms. Mochalova made references to “the Jewish community” after law enforcement agents arrived, prosecutors said.
Miles G. Cohen contributed reporting.
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