(Jewish Group) More Jewish Blood Spilled in Crown Heights

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Jews are still routinely being beaten on the streets of New York City. On Aug. 27, a young man heaved a large brick at Abraham Gopin, a 63-year-old member of the Chabad Hasidic community exercising in Lincoln Terrace Park, toward the eastern end of Crown Heights. Gopin was then approached by a man who yelled an anti-Jewish slur and then began punching him before hurling a large paving stone, knocking out Gopin’s front teeth and fracturing his nose. Benny Friedman, a Hasidic musician and Gopin’s son-in-law, tweeted a photo of the victim’s blood-stained tzitzit. “This is absolutely frightening,” Friedman wrote, “and obviously something that a civilization should never tolerate.”

Like others attacked over the past year and even over the past month—including three members of Williamsburg’s Satmar community assaulted the day after Tisha B’Av—there was no mistaking Gopin for a member of any other ethnic or religious group, and no discernible motive or provocation on the attacker’s part, other than his target being a Jew.

The attack on Gopin was especially violent—the brick left a gash large enough to require staples in his forehead. There have been dozens of violent incidents targeting Jews in New York over the past couple of years, but few have produced images of blood-soaked religious objects, an especially visceral reminder of how any outward expression of identity can endanger Jews even in some of the most Jewish places in the most Jewish city in America. And yet the daily experience of anti-Semitism in the city is often more routine. Later on the morning of Gopin’s attack, an East Flatbush resident named Yossi Blachman tweeted, “My 12 year old was just at that park 2 hours ago. As soon as he gets there he sees an Anti Semite talk to his friend pointing at my son saying those F***ing Jews…. he was frightened and immediately left the park.”

When Tablet reached him, Blachman explained that the people who had pointed and cursed at his son were in their teens or early 20s. “It happened to my kid today, but it happens so often,” Blachman added, explaining he’d had almost identical language directed at him near his home one year earlier. “It’s not like a one in a million thing. It’s something that’s happening to people daily.” Still, it was the first time his son had experienced anti-Semitic harassment of this kind, in a place not far from where a man in his mid-60s had been bludgeoned just a few hours earlier.

more...