Prayer brings SAR and Ramaz students to Gracie Mansion

Hundreds of Jewish students from SAR (the Salanter Akiba of Riverdale) and Manhattan’s Ramaz School streamed off yellow school buses on the Upper East Side on Friday morning, gathering outside Gracie Mansion with prayer books in hand. 

Organizers said the gathering of elementary and high school students was meant to give them a public way to express Jewish pride, respond to concerns about antisemitism and affirm their ties to Israel.

“This is a peaceful prayer vigil — it’s not a protest or a demonstration,” said Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of SAR Academy, meant to let students make two parts of their identity visible at once: their attachment to New York and their connection to Israel.

“We love the city, we love the state of Israel,” he told the crowd. “We don’t think that’s a contradiction, and we’re here to stay.”

Speakers challenged Mamdani over his rhetoric about Israel, saying some Jewish New Yorkers have felt less safe or respected.

For many of the students, the morning was also about what it meant to be visibly Jewish among hundreds of their peers. Annie Crog, an SAR Academy eighth grader, stood before the crowd and spoke about the role students could play even before they were old enough to cast a ballot.

“I want to feel safe being openly Jewish in my city,” she said. “I want to be able to wear my magen David, go to synagogue and go to school without being afraid of antisemitism.”

The event was not without controversy, sparking a petition signed by more than 380 SAR and Ramaz students, parents, alumni and others. It argued that the location would inevitably turn the morning into a political statement against the mayor.

Holding the event at his residence, the petition said, would “needlessly inflame tensions between the mayor and the Modern Orthodox Jewish community” and cast the community as united against Mamdani when its members are not.

Rabbi Krauss defended the decision in an essay published before the service, writing that students had been told what the gathering would involve and families were given the opportunity to opt out.

Stella Zavodnick, a senior at SAR High School in attendance, described a Jewish identity that had once felt almost effortless — Shabbat dinners, holidays and Hebrew words woven into ordinary conversation — but became more complicated after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the continuous conflict that followed.

“Being Jewish started to feel like something we had to think about — where we said it and who we said it to,” she said.

But, she said, Jewish history had taught her about persistence through periods of fear and displacement. 

“My Jewish identity didn’t begin with a hard year, and it isn’t defined by one either,” she said.  

That connection between Jewish identity and Israel became more personal as the program turned back toward prayer.

Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (The Bayit) stepped forward holding the military identification tags of his grandchildren, who served in the IDF, before leading a tefillah for chayalim.

“May all who go out, each one come back well and healthy and alive,” he said.

The event closed just as it began, with hundreds of voices joining together.

Students and adults locked arms and swayed through Hatikvah, later placing their hands over their hearts for The Star-Spangled Banner before making their way back toward the yellow school buses and returning to class.

This is an abridged version of a report in this week’s Riverdale Press.