The daughters of slain Second Avenue Deli owner Abe Lebewohl have renewed their calls on Manhattan prosecutors to make an arrest in connection with his 1996 murder.
Felicia Lebewohl Rosen and Sharon Lebewohl spoke to The Post about their efforts and a new documentary about their father’s unsolved killing a week after the Upper East Side location of the family’s iconic Jewish delicatessen was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti.
Abe, a 64-year-old Holocaust survivor, was shot three times on March 4, 1996, by at least two robbers while delivering a $12,000 deposit to the NatWest Bank at Second Avenue and Fourth Street in the East Village, police said.
In a May letter to District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Felicia and Sharon said the cold case was the city’s “most notorious unsolved murder,” and said a third suspect who worked at the deli, may have been involved with the deadly heist.
“It’s really perplexing that the authorities didn’t make an arrest for my father’s murder. It seemed they had enough information to make an arrest,” said Felicia, 63.
Sharon, 64, echoed her younger sisters concerns, but added she was feeling “hopeful” that a new documentary would put pressure on the DA’s office to end the 27-year mystery.
“I’m very surprised they haven’t solved the case. When we were sitting Shiva, we were told there would be an arrest by the end of the week,” said Sharon, 64.
“It just slipped away. We were told detectives worked on the case the whole time.”
Documentarian Ken Frydman, who worked as a consulting producer on John Marks’ documentary documentary, “Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?,” said he knows a lot about the case, including persons of interest in the Lebewohl murder.
“We can’t publicly name a suspect or person of interest before the cops do. But I’m comfortable saying that our reporting for the documentary has determined that the persons of interest on March 4, 1996 — the day Abe Lebewohl was murdered making a bank deposit — remain the same persons of interest 27 and a half years later,” Frydman told The Post.
“Robert Morgenthau was Manhattan DA for another 20 years after the murder of his friend Abe Lebewohl, but didn’t bring an indictment. The original ADA told the Lebewohl family early in the investigation that the DA’s office ‘had enough to arrest and indict, but not convict'”
Bragg, a Democrat, did not respond to the sister’s request for a meeting, prompting them to write another missive in July that said they were “deeply disappointed, frustrated, and perplexed” not to have heard back.
His office told The Post Monday it was “looking into this.”
Felicia said her father Abe, a native of Poland, would have been chilled by seeing a Nazi emblem scrawled on the family business in the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal terror attack in Israel.
“My father was a proud, outspoken Jew. He was a Holocaust survivor. To see a swastika on my father’s business is outrageous,” she said.
“The rise of antisemitism across the globe is scary and mind-boggling. Shocking.”