Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat who has ingratiated himself with Haredi leaders, won his election on Tuesday to take over disgraced politician George Santos’s seat in the U.S. Congress.
With 93% of ballots counted as of Wednesday morning, Suozzi leads Republican Mazi Pilip, an Orthodox Jew, by about eight percentage points. Suozzi will represent a district that includes parts of northeastern Queens and the North Shore of Long Island, an area that does not include many Hasidic or Litvish residents, aside from Chabad emissaries. The district is, however, home to a growing community of Bukharian Jews, separate from the community’s main base in Forest Hills, Queens.
Suozzi, who is staunchly pro-Israel, represented this district in Congress before leaving to run for governor of New York. During that race, he courted Haredi leaders’ support, meeting with Chabad-Lubavitch leaders and attending a Satmar event. He was endorsed in the primary by Chabad rabbi Shea Hecht. Suozzi also received campaign contributions from Leon Goldenberg, a trustee for the Haredi organization Agudath Israel of America, and Rabbi Michael Melnick, who made his contribution using the address for the main headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch community, 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Suozzi explained his views on the state of Haredi education during his gubernatorial bid. In 2022, he told the New York Times editorial board that he believed 99% of Jewish schools offered “very good” education, and for the rest, “you should be calling them out and trying to send a task force in there to try and persuade them to change.” When a member of the board told Suozzi that the state had been unsuccessful in using that strategy, Suozzi said, “I don’t know that it hasn’t worked.”
Tuesday’s special election took place after Santos was expelled from Congress on Dec. 1 after prosecutors accused him of misusing campaign funds.
Less than two weeks after a building in Borough Park partially collapsed, killing one construction worker, the New York City Department of Buildings discovered an illegal excavation project in a different section of Borough Park and ordered the evacuation of three attached buildings on 13th Avenue, according to a report on News12.
More than a dozen tenants were now forced out of their homes. The Red Cross told News12 that they were assisting 16 people to find new homes, including four children.
According to the report, the city was first alerted to the illegal construction on Feb. 2, the same day a construction worker died in a partial collapse of a building less than a mile away, also without a permit. As Shtetl reported at the time, that residential single family home also served as a synagogue.
The city only gained access to the 13th Avenue buildings on Sunday, Feb. 11, and, upon discovering that the excavation was destabilizing the building, immediately ordered the evacuation.
Early Monday morning, a post on the DOB’s account on X, formerly Twitter, included a meme of Kansas City football player Travis Kelce shouting at his coach, with the post in all caps:
“STOP EXCAVATING OUT THE FLOORS OF YOUR BASEMENTS WITHOUT ENGINEERED DRAWINGS AND PERMITS.
“YOU ARE DESTABILIZING THE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF YOUR BUILDINGS…”
The building is said to be owned by a kosher grocery store called Kosher Mehadrin Operations USA, an LLC, which allows the owner to remain anonymous.
New Jersey lawmakers are drafting legislation to improve patient safety after an article in NJ Advance Media raised alarm about the treatment of disabled people at a Haredi-run institution.
A young autistic woman was neglected to the point of extreme tooth decay and alarming thinness at the Special Children’s Center, a state-funded group home in Lakewood meant to serve disabled adults and children, according to the NJ.com report.
The 18-year-old woman, whom NJ.com named only as “Leah,” lived at the center when employees informed her mother that no one was consistently administering Leah’s medication or brushing her teeth. Eventually, executive director Chaya Bender sent the mother an email saying the center couldn’t meet Leah’s needs, and she was removed from the facility.
Two former employees for the center told NJ.com about systemic problems at the center, saying that management sometimes denied requests to take children to the doctor. They also said that when employees struggled to take care of children, they sometimes gave the children medication to put them to sleep or calm them down.
Bender did not respond to calls and emails from NJ.com.
The Special Children’s Center was founded by Bender along with Jenine Shwekey, wife of the popular Orthodox musician Yaakov Shwekey. The center is expanding to Brooklyn and the Five Towns, the founders told the hosts of the Meaningful People podcast.
Haredi newlyweds in Borough Park are facing a severe shortage of apartments available for rent, according to multiple Haredi news outlets.
Calling it a “crisis” and a “painful reality,” the Haredi news website BoroPark24 reported that many families are struggling to find suitable places for newlyweds to live after their wedding. Many couples are being “forced” to live in basements or even pay for hotel stays until they can find something more suitable.
“In the end,” one parent told BoroPark24, “we had no choice but to take a furnished apartment in a tiny basement, so below standard from anything we imagined.”
Among the factors leading to this crisis are high interest rates on new mortgages, explosive population growth in many Haredi communities, and the costly infrastructure required for establishing new communities.
In recent years, however, new Haredi communities have sprung up outside of the more established ones. One example is a thriving new community in Linden, N.J., which has, over the past decade, become a viable alternative to places like Borough Park, Williamsburg, Monsey, or Lakewood.
More intrepid couples have ventured even farther, with new Hasidic communities springing up in Mount Olive and Greenville, N.J., and even as far out as Casa Grande, Ariz., and Tampa, Fla.
A man who terrorized the Lakewood community in a string of violent attacks two years ago pleaded guilty on Thursday to federal hate crimes and a carjacking.
Yesterday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the state of New Jersey announced that Dion Marsh, 29, pleaded guilty on charges of attempting to murder four Orthodox Jews and injuring one other in and around Lakewood, New Jersey. The incidents unfolded on an afternoon in April 2022, when Marsh, from nearby Manchester, deliberately rammed a vehicle into four identifiably Orthodox Jews. In two of those incidents, he used a car he stole from another Orthodox man, whom he had assaulted and injured earlier that afternoon. In one instance, he got out of the car after ramming it into a victim and stabbed the man in the chest.
According to reports at the time, the stabbing victim was in serious condition, but there were no reported fatalities.
Marsh faced five hate crime charges and one carjacking charge.
U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger said, “This defendant violently attacked five men, driving a car into four of them, stabbing one of them in the chest, and attempting to kill them, simply because they were visibly identifiable as Orthodox Jews.”
A close friend of Marsh, Ryan Zimmerman, told Shtetl that Marsh was under the heavy influence of drugs at the time, and was not motivated by antisemitism.
“I know the real Dion,” Zimmerman said, and he was “a loving, caring man, that would take the shirt off his back for you.”
“He deserves a chance to prove himself sober,” Zimmerman added.
Marsh faces life in prison for these crimes, and he will be sentenced on June 11th.
One person has died in a building collapse in Borough Park, Brooklyn, on Friday, police told multiple news outlets.
The 33-year-old construction worker died when the first floor of a building collapsed onto the basement at 1266 50th Street, near 13th Avenue.
The two-story residential building also operated as a synagogue called Congregation Minchas Yehuda, which serves members of Stitshin, a small Hasidic sect, according to multiple sources. The owner of the building, Juda Horowitz, shares the name of the Stitshin rebbe, Yehudah Horowitz, who died in 1981.
First responders arrived at the building just after noon, according to the New York Post — less than five hours before the beginning of Shabbos.
Construction had been ongoing on the site, and there was a partial stop work order for all construction not geared toward making the site safe. On Jan. 4, the owner incurred a $2,500 penalty for working without a permit, according to the New York City Department of Buildings.
Conspiracy theorists online have already seized on the incident, atempting to connect the death in Borough Park to the Crown Heights tunnels recently discovered four miles away. “Chabad Tunnel Jews Strike Again!” wrote alt-right internet personality Stew Peters, who is also a Holocaust denier. Borough Park and Crown Heights are two entirely separate Hasidic communities, and the Crown Heights tunnels were dug by Chabad Meshichists in an unauthorized attempt to expand the main Chabad synagogue.
No other injuries were reported, the FDNY said.
A Toms River Township Council meeting on Zoom was abruptly shut down on Wednesday after an unknown speaker interrupted the discussion with antisemitic remarks.
In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Shlomo Schorr, an Agudath Israel official in New Jersey, a voice is heard interrupting the discussion by saying, “We have that problem with the Jews and the tunnels where they suck the babies’ penises.”
A meeting organizer is then heard saying, “You gotta cut the meeting. Cut it, cut it.”
The Toms River township, just south of Lakewood, New Jersey, a Haredi stronghold for decades, has seen its Haredi population increase significantly in recent years, at times sparking tension with some non-Haredi residents, who fear the area being turned into a Haredi enclave.
Toms River mayor Daniel Rodrick called the disruptive comments “disgusting” and said the matter was under investigation, according to the Lakewood Scoop.
The unknown speaker appeared to reference tunnels recently discovered at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, where a group of young men attempted an unauthorized expansion of the synagogue and then got into a chaotic confrontation with police, who had arrived to restore order. Photos and videos of the incident spread widely across the internet, and sparked an avalanche of conspiracy theories about those tunnels. Prominent far right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones suggested the tunnel was built for purposes of child sexual abuse.
The speaker also appeared to be referencing metzitza be’peh, a controversial Haredi practice during circumcision that involves oral suction of the wound, following an ancient Jewish tradition that was originally meant to prevent infection.
Mordechai Pinchas Spitzer, an 8-year-old Hasidic boy in New Square, was struck by a school bus and killed on Monday, according to Hudson Valley News 12 and the Haredi news outlets Rockland Daily and Kol Mevaser.
The fifth-grader was walking home from his New Square school at the intersection of Clinton Lane and Stern Street when he stepped in front of the bus and was killed in front of classmates, sources told the three news outlets. Hatzoloh of New Square arrived at the scene, but the boy was declared dead around 6pm.
"The driver was still on scene and is cooperating with the police at this time,” Town of Ramapo Police Department Lt. Blaine Howell told News 12. “It's currently under investigation by the Accident Reconstruction Team."
Agudath Israel of America, an organization that lobbies for Haredi interests, released a statement on Friday applauding the U.S.’s suspension of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
“The idea of agency employees actually partnering with Hamas and being complicit in the bloodthirsty torture, murder and kidnapping of innocents, staggers the imagination,” the Agudah statement said.
Since Oct. 7, Agudah has encouraged the U.S. federal government to provide funding and weapons to Israel and opposed a ceasefire. While Haredi leaders are generally opposed to Israel’s secular orientation, Agudah’s staunch pro-Israel advocacy reflects an affinity Haredim nonetheless maintain with Israel and its citizens.
Several countries, including the U.S., suspended funding to the agency after Israeli authorities alleged that some UNRWA employees were involved in the planning of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner general, said UNRWA launched an independent investigation of Israel’s claims, and that he hopes countries will still find a way to support humanitarian efforts in Palestine.
Hasidic entertainer Lipa Schmeltzer was lightly injured after getting into an accident while on his way to perform at a wedding on Tuesday evening, Arutz Sheva reported.
The incident occured near the George Washington Bridge after the popular singer hit a guardrail with his Tesla. According to the report, Schmeltzer said, “I am leaving here thanks to miracles. I thank G-d.”
Subsequent hospital tests showed Schmeltzer had suffered no major injuries, and the singer still managed to show up at the wedding he had been heading to just before it ended.
In a post this morning on X, formerly Twitter, Schmeltzer posted a video of the accident’s aftermath, and wrote, “Feeling much better. Miracles. And the airbags worked well.”
He also joked that since the price of Tesla vehicles has dropped since he bought his car, insurance won’t pay the initial full value — but, he wrote, “I lost about the same amount that I had profited from the Tesla stock. lol but not lol. I am glad I am alive.”
A Brooklyn man man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly burglarizing three Monsey synagogues within the past few weeks, according to multiple media reports.
42-year-old Joel Jungries was apprehended by Ramapo police after three synagogues on Monsey Boulevard and Suzanne Drive, in the largely Haredi hamlet of Monsey, in Rockland County, were broken into and had cash stolen from charity boxes.
Jungries faces five counts of burglary and one count of grand larceny, all of which are felonies. He also faces four misdemeanor charges.
Jungries was released pending further court appearance.
Days after scenes of chaos at Chabad headquarters sparked a flood of antisemitic reactions on social media, a Chabad rabbi was invited to deliver the invocation on the floor of the New York State Senate in Albany last Wednesday, the Haredi news outlet the Rockland Daily reported.
Invited by state senator Bill Weber, Rabbi Shmuel Gancz, the director of Chabad of Suffern in Rockland County, cited the legacy of the Lubavitcher rebbe, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to remind senators of the weight of their responsibility.
“As we face rising levels of hatred, antisemitism, and acts of terror around the world, and this week we marked 100 days of captivity of 136 innocent individuals, we gain inspiration from the words of Moses,” Gancz said. “‘You will have done what is incumbent upon you, so I will do what is incumbent upon me,’ says God.”
Gancz went on to pray for God to bless the country and state, and guide the legislators toward wisdom.
