Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Re-Lighting Ceremony Held for Vandalized New York Menorah

A re-lighting ceremony for a menorah that had been vandalized two nights in a row was held Monday night at Carl Schurz park on New York’s Upper East Side.

“It was a time to call the community back to add some light to darkness,” Rabbi Elie Weinstock of the Congretation Kehilath Jeshurun said to the gatherered crowd, which included Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The toppled 100-pound menorah was just blocks from Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.

“This is the epitome of who we are because even when confronted by hatred, by division, we stand up, we show our strength, we show our resilience,” de Blasio said.

“When we see an act of prejudice, when we see an act of hate, we must respond to it.”

NYPD hate crime detectives are investigating.

Elsewhere, a menorah was stolen from a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Salt Lake City, Utah, over the weekend. It was found outside an alumni house at a nearby college.

The theft was not being investigated as a hate crime.

Rabbi Benny Zippel told The Associated Press that the perpetrators were likely just “bored souls” who did not mean to be anti-Semitic.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.