A 22-year-old Brooklyn man was charged with assault as a hate crime after the police said he yelled “Free Palestine” and “Do you want to die?” before stabbing a young man near a synagogue in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn early Saturday morning.
The 22-year-old man, Vincent Sumpter, was charged with second-degree assault as a hate crime in the attack, which occurred around 2 a.m. Saturday on Kingston Avenue, around the corner from the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement on Eastern Parkway. It was unclear on Sunday whether he had been arraigned or had a lawyer.
Yaacov Behrman, a rabbi who is a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, said that Mr. Sumpter exchanged words with the victim, whom he identified as Yechiel Michel Dabrowskin, before stabbing him once in the chest. Rabbi Behrman said that Mr. Dabrowskin, who is Jewish and about 30 years old, was taken to Maimonides Medical Center and was expected to recover from his wounds.
“This is obviously a very serious incident, and there has been a lot of antisemitic rhetoric,” Rabbi Behrman said. “I’m concerned that unless this rhetoric stops, it’s going to become more common, sadly.”
A surveillance video shows a brief confrontation on the sidewalk between a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a backpack and several young men in white shirts and black pants. The man in the sweatshirt thrusts his right arm repeatedly toward one of the group of men and continues walking toward them before turning and running away. Several men are then seen running after him.
Rabbi Behrman said the attacker provoked the group by yelling “Free Palestine.” When they approached him to ask why, he responded, “Do you want to die?” Rabbi Behrman said. That was when he stabbed the victim and fled, he said.
Several recent incidents targeting Jewish people in Brooklyn have been charged as hate crimes. Earlier this month, two people faced hate crime charges after they were accused of being part of a group of vandals who smeared red paint and graffiti at the homes of the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum and other leaders of the institution. In May, a man was charged after the police said he yelled antisemitic statements and then drove onto a sidewalk and tried to strike pedestrians outside an Orthodox Jewish school in East Flatbush.
Mark Treyger, chief executive of Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, said in a social media post about the attack on Saturday, “This is a dangerous escalation of the current climate we are in and it should outrage every New Yorker because it is an attack on every New Yorker.”