Brooklyn public school used for pro-Hamas demonstrations

The demonstrations are a violation of rules against using such facilities for political activities.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A group of anti-Israel activists are regularly using the grounds of a New York City public school to protest the country’s war against Hamas, The New York Post reported on Saturday.

While the playground of PS139 in Brooklyn is open over the weekend for the surrounding community to use its facilities, the Sunday demonstrations are a violation of the rules banning the use of publicly funded educational institutions for political activities, the paper said.

The weekly, hour-long morning “Vigil for Palestine” is promoted by a group calling itself “PS139 Families for Palestine.”

“Everybody has a right to protest, but to use New York City school property to do that is wrong,” said the uncle of a student in the grade school.

“They hate Jews,” he added. “If you’re Jewish, it’s automatically assumed you’re pro-Israel and pro-war.”

The institution is located in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush, which has a large Orthodox Jewish population.

The demonstrations, which began in January, worry people in the local community, as the group does not just stand around with placards.

Naomi Cohn, a lawyer who lives next to the school, said that two weeks ago, “I saw them parading around the schoolyard, posting written materials on the fence and handing them out to people watching their children play.”

At that rally, a witness told the New York daily, a protestor had also threatened a Jewish onlooker, saying, “We know your name” and “We know where you live.”

Tova Plaut, an instructional coordinator for pre-K teachers in the city’s public schools who fights against antisemitism in the education system, said that the group’s actions were more than just harassment.

“It endangers Jewish lives and embeds bigotry into the fabric of our educational system,” Plaut said. “It ensures that hatred of Jews takes root in the hearts of our youth.”

One of the group’s leaders is Cindy Gorn, a parent association member. The association allowed the group to donate several books by extreme, anti-Israel authors to be raffled at its annual fundraiser last month.

The group also recently attempted to force the cancellation of a local synagogue’s luncheon in honor of the IDF’s combat search and rescue extraction group, Unit 669, working together with the antisemitic Jewish Voice for Peace and the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation.

Their Instagram post on the evening said, “We made it clear — no genocide propaganda or fundraising in our neighborhood.”

This angered Jewish supporters of Israel, who wrote to PS139’s principal and other elected officials to protest these parents’ “incitement disguised as community activism” on school grounds and cited the Chancellor’s Regulations that barred schools from being sites of political acts.

They demanded that the school and Department of Education stop allowing “the unauthorized and inflammatory use of your school’s identity.”

While a Department of Education spokesperson told The Post that “As soon as we were alerted of this incident, we engaged with this group to inform them of the rules, and they have now removed ‘PS’ from their materials,” it did not say it would bar them from using the school playground.

The group still calls itself PS139 Families for Palestine on its Instagram page, the paper noted.

anti-Israel activistsAntisemitismNew York Citypublic school