Mamdani visit to Eichler’s sparks a firestorm

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s visit to Eichler’s Judaica store in Borough Park last week was an “embarrassment” that allowed him to portray himself as an ally of Jews while continuing to promote anti-Israel views, Inna Vernikov, a Jewish member of the New York City Council, told JNS.

The mayor, whose visit was disrupted by an irate woman in the store, met with Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Borough Park Jewish Community Council, Rabbi Yaakov Landau, and Hirsch Meir Traube, who owns the Borough Park Eichler’s store. The store is separately owned from the Eichler’s store in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood.

The mayor’s director of special projects, Uri Fraenkel, blew a shofar and the mayor was gifted honey to symbolize the hope for a sweet New Year.

Every Jew who helped “stage” the mayor’s “photo op allowed the mayor to keep selling a lie that one can be an ally of the Jewish people while denying the basic reality of Judaism,” according to Vernikov, a Ukrainian-born Republican who represents Brooklyn’s 48th District.

“The question is not whether the mayor is allowed to walk into a shop,” she said. “The question is who invited him into the heart of our community and why anyone thought that was an honor.”

“Courtesy to the office of the mayor is one thing,” Vernikov said. “Drawing a crowd, though very modest for a community that usually flocks to comparable events, presenting gifts, using religious objects and treating him like an honored guest is another.”

“It’s an embarrassment and disservice to the majority of Jewish New Yorkers who did not vote for him, including roughly 85% of Borough Park,” she said.

Mayoral spokesman Sam Raskin responded that Mamdani was “proud to visit Borough Park ahead of the High Holidays” and “ to wish everyone a shanah tovah and a happy and healthy new year.”

While Mamdani was at the store, a woman identified as Stephanie Benshimol called out to the mayor, “Stop the antisemitism! You have all the power to stop the antisemitism. I’m begging you to do it.”

Unidentified people tried to nudge her away from Mamdani.

Raskin said that Benshimol does not live in Borough Park, and he disputed the suggestion that she was a shopper who happened upon the mayoral visit.

“She was not a shopper who was passing by,” Raskin said. “She came directly to the shop.”

Menachem Gindi, an employee at Eichler’s, was there and told CBS News NY that it was similar to visits made by politicians in the past to the store.

“I was shocked that he was coming,” said Gindi, of when his boss, the owner, gave him a heads up. 

When Benshimol yelled at the mayor, “it was uncomfortable, but I would say that she’s right,” Gindi said.

During Mamdani’s first month in office, “antisemitic incidents spiked far more sharply still,” 182% in fact, Vernikov said. “Our people are assaulted, our streets desecrated with vile graffiti and our shuls protested.”

NYPD last week released data showing that Jews were targeted in 19 — or 42% — of the city’s 45 confirmed hate crimes in August.

Eichler’s does not “take any political sides” as a business, said Traube, the owner.

If community rabbis or Agudath Israel of America were to “tell us otherwise not to welcome, not accept anyone, we will for sure do that,” he said. “But as a business owner, I do not have the capacity or the shoulders to take any political sides or to turn the business into a political field.”

“We weren’t involved in kicking anyone out of the store,” he said. “We do support Israel. Am Yisrael Chai.”

Mamdani has been harshly critical of Israel and has taken steps to distance the city government from Israel-related partnerships.

On his first day in office, he revoked an order by former Mayor Eric Adams adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. In May, he boycotted the annual Israel Day parade.

His contact with the Jewish community has largely involved progressive and anti-Zionist factions and organizations, and he has dismissed calls to tone down his rhetoric by those who claim it is leading to more attacks on, and threats against, Jews in the city.

“When he is not libeling Israel, threatening to jail its prime minister or denying the Jewish people’s historical connection to our homeland, including Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, he plays the ally by surrounding himself with carefully curated Jewish symbols that omit Israel,” Vernikov said.

“Always with that wide Cheshire cat smile that says ‘look how warm I am, while I spend the rest of the year mainstreaming hatred of your people’,” she said. “All in the name of ‘progressive values,’ of course.”

Vernikov acknowledged that many Jews in Borough Park do not identify as Zionists but said that opposition to Zionism within parts of the Orthodox community should not be equated with anti-Zionism from outside the Jewish community.

“There is no festival on our calendar that is not bound to our ancestral homeland,” she said. “We are called the People of Yisrael. Many of the Torah’s mitzvot can only be in the Land of Israel. The very way we daven,” or pray, “today was set in Jerusalem.”

Vernikov cited the late Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a fierce opponent of political Zionism, who she said taught that fervent anti-Zionist non-Jews “hate the Jewish people.”

“Mamdani fits the Rebbe’s description of this type of non-Jew to a T,” she said.

“Look at the company he keeps,” she said. “The ‘love of his life’ liked posts celebrating Oct. 7, the day it happened, which would have included slaughtering the Jews at the Kotel had Hamas gotten as far as they wanted.”

“Bringing such an individual into our community so close to the yahrtzeit of those murdered Jews is a mockery of their memory,” she said.

The blowing of the shofar, “a custom interlaced with our historical connection to the land of Israel,” is one example, she said.

“Blowing the shofar has another meaning I think is relevant — to ‘awaken slumbering souls that have grown complacent’,” she said. “To Jews who have still not been paying attention, now might be a good time to start.” —JNS