The NYPD has charged a woman in connection with an anti-Semitic attack on a young Jewish man in Brooklyn on New Year’s Day.
Jasmine Lucas, 24, was charged with second-degree assault and criminal mischief for allegedly attacking a 22-year-old Jewish man in Williamsburg at around 12:45pm on Wednesday. She and another 34-year-old woman reportedly shouted anti-Semitic slurs at the man and knocked him to the ground.
The man then began recording the women, at which point Lucas grabbed his phone, threw it to the ground, and punched him in the throat.
“They took him and threw him down to the ground, and broke his phone and threw the phone at his head,” said Moses Weiser, who witnessed the incident. “It’s unbelievable what’s going on. This is a shame.”
The second woman involved was questioned but released without charges. The man was taken to a hospital for medical treatment.
The incident is the latest in a string of violent hate crimes against Jews in the tri-state area and marks the thirteenth reported hate crime against Jews in ten days in the city.
Last week, a man attacked a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York and stabbed five people. The NYPD has also released footage of a group of men hitting a 23-year-old Hasidic man over the head with a chair last week. Authorities suspect the same group is responsible for an attack a 56-year-old Hasidic man caught on security cameras nearby the same day.
State troopers and the NYPD have upped their presence in Jewish neighborhoods as the violence has escalated. The Guardian Angels, the unarmed citizen group that patrolled the New York City subway in the 1970s, has joined in protection efforts as well.
“If they’re going to attack Jews, they’re going to pay the price,” said Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. “They’re starting to call the Guardian Angels, as they did in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early-‘90s. We shouldn’t have to go back to that period of time. We became such a better city, and now we’re beginning to slip back into the abyss.”