SWC Urging NY Political and Spiritual Leaders, FBI Director to Act Following Threatening Anti-Semitic Demonstrations by Black Hebrew Israelites 

December 5, 2022

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) urges New York’s political and spiritual leaders to denounce the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, an anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and misogynistic group, following anti-Semitic protests outside Brooklyn’s Barclay Center supporting Kanye West and Kyrie Irving.
 
The latest demonstrations included shouts of, “Did the Holocaust happen?…it did happen and we’re glad that it happened”…”We support Hitler”…“Kanye and Kyrie are shaking things up”.  Watch video: https://twitter.com/viralnewsnyc/status/1599796395200110592?s=21
 
The SWC also reiterates its call to FBI Director Chief Christoper Wray to establish a Special Taskforce on Anti-Semitism and to specifically investigate the emerging threat of domestic terrorism targeting Jews in the US city with the largest Jewish population.
 
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the SWC, and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action of the SWC, issued the following statement:

“No group, no community, no faith has had to endure the onslaught of hate crimes on our streets and vile attacks on social media in our country than American Jewry. A new report out from NYPD shows that last month, anti-Semitic hate crimes were up 125 percent in New York. Jews are just over two percent of our country but have suffered 63 percent of all hate crimes based on religion.  To defeat this intolerable and dangerous situation, we need help from our elected officials but also from faith leaders. We hope that clergy will use their pulpits to denounce history’s oldest hate and that our neighbors in the Black communities, led by their clergy, denounce the shocking surge of Jew-hatred from within their communities.”

For further information contact the Center’s Communications department at pressinquiries@wiesenthal.com, join the Center on Facebook, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent directly to your Twitter feed.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).