Two men with hateful intentions were caught on footage threatening to kill a group of eight young Jewish men on a Brooklyn subway. In the clip, one of the attackers wrestled one of the men by the collar while the other shouted a threat.
The convoy of boys was heading back to the Chabad‑Lubavitch center in Brooklyn after a Hanukkah gathering at Union Square. When they were transferring at the Franklin Avenue station, the pair—seemingly a father and his son—began hurling antisemitic insults.
“They yelled at me, and the son said, ‘I’ll kill you,’” explained 20‑year‑old yeshiva student Mendy Asraf, who had come from Israel and was sitting with the group.
At the train stop they shouted, “F–k the Jews,” Asraf recounted. Once on the No. 3 train, the aggression intensified. One of the boys on board filmed the situation while the other, clutching a victim’s jacket, threatened again. A quick glance at the footage shows the attacker grabbing the man’s coat collar, the other pointing a finger‑gun and repeating, “I’ll kill you.”
“I was really afraid. When he made his fingers the sign of a gun towards me, I didn’t know what he had in his pockets,” Asraf told reporters. The rest of the boys stayed silent, while fellow passengers tried to calm the scene. “Chill!” one com‑muter can be heard pleading in the video, attempting to pacify the confrontation.
Police were notified of the assault around 8:41 p.m. by two of the victims. After the incident, the quartet disembarked at the next stop—Nordstrom Avenue—and hurried to the nearest precinct to file a report.
“I thought it could be a very dangerous situation,” Asraf said. “They recognized our appearance along with the menorahs,” he added, noting the group had been carrying the symbols of their holiday as part of their celebration outreach.
The authorities confirmed that the alleged attackers had not yet been publicly identified. No physical harm was reported, but the encounter left the young men and their friends on edge, especially after the tragic Hanukkah shooting in Sydney, Australia, that killed 15 people the previous week.
Asraf shared that his mother had warned him about the dangers of being a visible Orthodox Jew in New York: “It’s going to be dangerous – keep your eyes open.” He said that, although he had felt a hint of antisemitism before, this level of hate he had never experienced.
Police investigate the event as a hate crime, and all available footage is being analyzed to identify the two assailants.
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