Manhattan synagogue says it won’t host Mamdani on Yom Kippur, following mayoral candidate’s Rosh Hashanah service in Brooklyn

Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani sits beside Comptroller Brad Lander at Kolot Chayeinu Rosh Hashanah services on Sept. 22, 2025. Screenshot of Kolot Chayeinu livestream

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(JTA) — Rabbi Sam Kates-Goldman had a message for his congregants — and his city — on Rosh Hashanah when he acknowledged and offered gratitude to a prominent regular and a special guest in the pews.

Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a longtime Kolot Chayeinu congregant, and Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in the mayor’s race, were sitting in one of the first rows, each wearing a kippah and an obligatory face mask.

Kates-Goldman offered a welcome and expressed “gratitude” for the political pair’s presence at the service, which comes as some Jews in the city have balked at Mamdani’s candidacy over his stances on Israel.

“That is how we live in community together,” the rabbi said. “It is not just by pulling back, but even when we are afraid, it is by pulling together. That interdependence defines us, and I want you gentlemen to know that you are not doing this work alone. And you being here tells us that we are not doing it alone. We’re so glad to have you back. Thanks for being here.”

If the moment offered a high-water mark for Mamdani’s engagement with local Jewish communities, it was soon followed by a new low. The New York Times, reporting on Mamdani’s visit to Kolot, reported that he would next join Rep. Jerry Nadler at a “more mainstream congregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan” for Yom Kippur services.

That prompted speculation that Nadler was planning to bring Mamdani, whom he has endorsed, to his own synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun. But BJ, a nondenominational synagogue, rebuffed the idea on Thursday.

“Assemblymember Mamdani will not be joining services with our community,” B’nai Jeshurun told congregants by email on Thursday, shortly after sharing the same message as a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Yom Kippur is a holy day of deep spiritual significance, of introspection and prayer, not a time for political campaigning.”

The Times’ story did not name the synagogue where Nadler planned to take Mamdani, but he said some congregants “would be frankly very upset to see [Mamdani] there.”

He continued, “Obviously he ought to be trying to reassure the Jewish community. The community is very divided, basically on age lines.”

Ahead of the primary, B’nai Jeshurun hosted a mayoral candidate forum where Mamdani made an appearance. Last month, when asked by JTA whether B’nai Jeshurun would be endorsing any of the mayoral candidates, the synagogue’s leader, Rabbi Roly Matalon, said its rabbis would “not in the upcoming NYC mayoral election nor in any future elections.”

Mamdani’s rumored visit to B’nai Jeshurun would have come a week after he was welcomed with open arms at Kolot Chayeinu, a non-denominational synagogue in Brooklyn known for its progressive politics and pro-Palestinian activism, on Monday night for Rosh Hashanah services.

With his campaign subject to accusations of antisemitism due to his hardline stances against Israel, including his recent vow that he would seek the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if elected, Mamdani’s appearance at a synagogue that embraces pro-Palestinian activism was not likely to quiet his detractors.

Still, it underscored the backing he has gotten from progressive Jews, including Lander, who cross-endorsed him in the mayoral primary and has since emerged as his closest Jewish surrogate.

Mamdani previously visited Kolot Chayeinu for Shabbat services in February and also reportedly visited the flagship LGBTQIA+ synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, according to a post on X by Rabbi Abby Stein, a former part-time rabbi at Kolot Chayeinu.

During the Rosh Hashanah service, ahead of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead, Kates-Goldman acknowledged his grief at the killings of “tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

The rabbi also decried the “weaponization of antisemitism to push Islamophobia” in an apparent reference to some of Mamdani’s opponents.

Mamdani did not post about his appearance at the synagogue on social media. But ahead of the services he posted a video to X marking the beginning of the High Holy Days.

“The High Holy Days begin with Rosh Hashanah, when the Jewish calendar turns the year 5786. That number alone speaks of the endurance of this faith over millennia, its resilience despite wave after wave of persecution,” said Mamdani.

He then noted that Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday for atonement and repentance, will follow next week.

“It is a tradition we could all do well to emulate, to build a city that feels sweet and learns from what did not work in the past, where we are not afraid to admit our failings and to grow accordingly, and where, above all, every New Yorker is safe and cherished by the city they love,” Mamdani concluded.

Mamdani was not the only mayoral candidate to visit a synagogue for the Jewish new year.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo went to a service at the Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, and Mayor Eric Adams, wearing a blue velvet robe that was gifted to him by Bukharian synagogue in Queens, joined the Sephardic Lebanese Congregation, also known as Kol Eliyahu, in Brooklyn. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who has two Jewish sons, said he wished them “a new year in which they’re able to look back at Jewish history and understand the great traditions.”

While Kolot Chayeinu’s congregation appeared to warmly welcome Mamdani according to footage posted online, some Jews on social media criticized the synagogue for hosting him.

“Guess you have chosen to overlook his « from the river to the sea » comments. History tells us a leopard doesn’t change his spots,” wrote one user, appearing to reference Mamdani’s previous defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” on a Facebook post by Trish Arlin, an adult education teacher at Kolot Chayeinu.

Arlin pushed back on the criticism, writing “I ask you, with respect, to respect the possibility that I may know something about Zohran Mamdani that you don’t.”

She added, “I have heard Mr. Mamdani speak and though he is against what the right wing state of Israel does to the Palestinians (as am I), he is not an anti-Semite.”