Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Holocaust Survivor Who Fought Off Mugger Says ‘Ill’ Attacker Needs Treatment — Not Jail

(JTA) — A 91-year-old Holocaust survivor who fought off a purse snatcher said the alleged attacker arrested this week should not go to jail if she is mentally ill.

Gina Zuckerman, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, was 90 when she was jumped by a purse snatcher in September near New York’s Washington Square Park. The assailant tried to convince passers-by that she was Zuckerman’s health care aide. The nonagenarian was eventually thrown to the ground, but escaped from the attack with her purse, which contained about $10.

Lillian Maduro, 49, was arrested on Monday as the alleged attacker. She was ordered held on $50,000 bond or $25,000 cash bail.

“I am not vengeful, I just think this is a terrible thing for her to do,” Zuckerman told the New York Daily News. “I’ve been thinking about the lady, and I think she should go to a mental hospital. I don’t think she should go to a jail.”

Zuckerman, who required five stitches in her arm after the attack, spent six years in a German labor camp after the Nazis invaded her home country in 1939.

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.