Man who tried to kidnap Jewish boy in Brooklyn arrested

Luckily, the Hasidic father was holding him tightly by the hand and fended off the perpetrator.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The New York Police Department (NYPD) worked quickly Saturday and found the man who tried to kidnap a young Jewish boy in Brooklyn several hours earlier.

As a Hasidic man was walking down the street in the afternoon, holding his two youngsters by the hand, a man dressed in a blue and white jacket and wearing a ski mask passed by and suddenly grabbed one of them under the arms, lifting him high in the air.

The father, who didn’t let go, immediately hauled the small six-year-old back and pushed the man, who was considerably taller than him, in the stomach, and the would-be kidnapper fled into a nearby building.

No one was injured in the incident.

A street camera set up by Shomrim, a Jewish volunteer security group, caught the crime on tape.

The local police precinct was informed and, working together with Shomrim, officers managed to find the suspect and take him into custody Saturday night.

The short, silent video of the incident was posted to social media by many, including Chabad representative Yaacov Behrman, who wrote on X, “This video is shocking. A perpetrator grabbed a Chasidic child who was walking with his father today at approximately 3:30pm on Kingston near Lefferts Ave.”

“Something is clearly going on in Crown Heights—there have been incident after incident over the past two weeks,” he added.

The motive in this case is as yet unclear, but if, as suspected, it is a hate-based crime, it would be the fourth allegedly antisemitic physical assault the religious Crown Heights community has suffered in the last ten days.

On Wednesday, Behrman had reported on a severe beating a middle-aged Hasidic man endured at the hands of a pair of black teens when he refused to hand over his cellphone to them as per their demand.

On Monday morning, a black man punched a 13-year-old Jewish boy riding to school on his bike.

The week before, another African American had slashed a Jewish man in the face as he walked on the street.

An extremely serious incident took place in August, when a 22-year-old man stabbed a visibly Jewish man, Yechiel Dabrowski, in the abdomen while allegedly yelling “Free Palestine!” and antisemitic slurs.

Dabrowski, who was walking with two friends near the Chabad Hasidic headquarters in Crown Heights, called it “a miracle” that he was not killed, as the knife came “very close to my heart.”

The alleged perpetrator, Victor Sumpter, was soon caught and currently faces several assault charges, including four defined as hate crimes.

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported in August that 65% of all felony hate crimes in 2023 in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel were antisemitic in nature. Jews constitute some 10% of NYC’s population.

In all of New York state, 88% of all religious-based hate crimes were aimed at Jews, the report said.