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As Jewish Enclaves Spring Up Around NYC, So Does Intolerance

Associated Press

   MONSEY, NEW YORK - For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families priced out
   of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to
   the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper
   housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where
   their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust.

   The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York's Hudson Valley, the
   Catskills and northern New Jersey has led to predictable sparring over
   new housing development and local political control. It has also led to
   flare-ups of rhetoric that some say is cloaked anti-Semitism.

   Now, a pair of violent attacks on such communities, just weeks apart,
   worry many that intolerance is boiling over.

   On December10, a man and woman killed a police officer and then stormed
   into a kosher grocery in Jersey City, fatally shooting three people
   inside before dying in anhourslonggunfight with police. The slayings
   happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been
   relocating.

   And on Saturday, a man rushed into a rabbi's home in Monsey, New York,
   during a Hanukkah celebration, hacking at people with a machete. Five
   people were wounded. Federal prosecutors said the man charged in the
   attack, Grafton Thomas, had written journals containing anti-Semitic
   comments and a swastika and had researchedAdolfHitler's hatred of Jews
   online.

   Inflammatory rhetoric

   At a meeting Monday hosted by U.S. SenatorKirsten Gillibrand in
   Rockland County, where Monsey is, some Jewish leaderssaidinflammatory
   rhetoric on social media and from local elected officialshad
   contributedto an atmosphere ripe for anti-Semitic violence.

   Days after the killings in Jersey City, a local school board member
   there, Joan Terrell-Paige, assailed Jews as ``brutes'' on Facebook,
   saying she believed the killers were trying to send a message with the
   slaughter. ``Are we brave enough to explore the answer to
   theirmessage?`` she asked.

   A widely condemned political ad last summer created by a local
   Republican group claimed that an Orthodox Jewish county legislator was
   ``plotting a takeover'' that threatens ``our way of life.''

   Whether any of that heated rhetoric was a factor in the recent violence
   is unclear, but the legislator targeted in the video ad said that kind
   of hostile language has repercussions.

   ``In the last few years in Rockland County I have seen a rise in hate
   rhetoric, and I was able to foresee it would end in violence,'' said
   county legislator AronWieder. ``You have seen on social media where the
   Orthodox community has been called a cancer, leeches, people who don't
   pay taxes. It has become normal and accepted to say derogatory and
   hateful things about Jewish people.''

   Swastikas have been scrawled around the county, and frightened parents
   are asking law enforcement for more visible security at synagogues and
   schools,Wiedersaid.

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