A day after Jewish college kids found it necessary to barricade themselves inside a library in the center of Greenwich Village while a mob of repugnant terrorist-lovers banged on the locked doors trying to get at them, the NYPD let it be known that, on this Sabbath, Jews in Brooklyn had better remain at home.
Stay inside.
Lock the doors.
A pro-Palestinian protest is scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday in front of the Brooklyn Museum.
That’s a mile from 770 Eastern Parkway, the headquarters of the largest ultra-Orthodox sect in the world, the Lubavitch Hasidim.
Roughly 20,000 observant Jews live around 770, in the neighborhood called Crown Heights.
“Jews should definitely avoid the area,” a police source told COLlive.com.
“There’s no intel at this time in which direction the protest will head. Locals should definitely stay away from Eastern Parkway in that area.”
Our NYPD is telling the Jews of Brooklyn that they are at risk, and — this is the implicit corollary — they cannot be protected.
On the Sabbath, observant Jews do not use electricity or vehicles or screens of any kind.
To pass the time on a Sabbath afternoon, they often go on a long walk.
Not this weekend.
As the NYPD source said, after all, who knows which direction the mob will go?
Better for the Jews to stay inside.
Just as it became a matter of life and death for them to stay inside back in 1991, in the very same neighborhood.
What everyone is afraid of is a repeat of August 1991.
In Crown Heights that year, a three-day anti-Jewish riot followed a tragic automobile accident that took the life of a 7-year-old black child after he was hit by a car being driven by a Hasidic Jew.
Not only were 38 Jews beaten, seven Jewish-owned businesses were looted and burned to the ground.
“Let’s go get a Jew,” a mob chanted, and then they did — they murdered an Australian doctoral student named Yankel Rosenbaum, stabbing him and smashing in his skull.
At Cooper Union in Greenwich Village on Wednesday, the kids barricaded inside for their own safety saw members of the pro-terror mob glaring at them through glass doors.
Those kids heard taunts from outside and knew — as every Jew knows down to our multi-millennial marrow — that any of them, at any moment, could be Yankel Rosenbaum.
Stay inside.
Bar the doors.
Why do you think the marchers are meeting near Crown Heights anyway?
This is why.
Their purpose isn’t to call for a cease-fire or to advocate for the Palestinian people.
Their purpose is to make it known what October 7 made known: There will be no peace or security for any Jew anywhere in the world if they get their way.
And rather than announcing that it will send 5,000 cops into the streets to ensure that the mob does not disturb the afternoon walk of a single Jew, the NYPD says:
Stay inside.
Mind the mob.
The monsters are here.
Hide.
That’s what happened in 1991.
For two days after the car accident, the cops did almost nothing except stand by — due to the orders of a feckless and foolish mayor and his spineless police commissioner.
Unless, that is, they tried to intervene to help people and were beaten themselves.
More than 100 police officers were injured during that pogrom.
In the end, thousands of cops were finally committed to the effort and the riot ended.
So, eventually, did the feckless mayor’s career.
In 2023, three weeks after Jews in Israel were set upon by marauders who murdered 1,400 and injured nearly three times that many, in cities around the world and now in New York, the Jews outside Israel are under attack as never before in recent history — rather than finding themselves protected as never before.
No, they must stay inside.
Like Anne Frank, trapped for two years in an attic because any outdoor public breath would mean capture and death — and captured anyway because someone in the house below the attic ratted the Frank family out.
Stay inside.
Like the pianist Władysław Szpilman, played by Adrien Brody in “The Pianist” 20 years ago, who did not talk to another person for more than a year as he remained silent and all but motionless in a room in Warsaw after his family was deported to and slaughtered at Treblinka.
In my 62 years of life, I have thought every day of the blessing America has been to the Jewish people — a blessing unlike any my people have ever known.
And this, the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel, has been a blessing as well.
At this moment, though, the Jews had better hide.
I cannot tell you how terrifying this is.
