Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, identified the 50-year-old man, who was wearing a kippah when he was stabbed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday during the fast of Tisha B’Av, as Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus.

According to public profiles, Grunhaus has an M.B.A. and works in financial services. One site states that he lives in New York and another in Surfside, Fla. Multiple sources with knowledge told JNS that Grunhaus was in the process of moving from Manhattan to Florida. One source said that the move may be at least in part due to frustrations about Mamdani.

Another source, who wasn’t sure of the victim’s motivation for moving, told JNS that he was in the city “tying up loose ends” ahead of the move when he was attacked with a screwdriver.

“It’s extra upsetting, because he was on his way out of New York and heading toward Florida,” a friend of the victim’s told JNS. “It’s especially frustrating, because he was tying loose ends up in the city to head to Florida. This is such an upsetting and traumatic way to leave Manhattan.”

Speaking at the press conference, which the JCRC hosted with the UJA-Federation of New York and other partners at the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Friday morning, Rabbi Yosie Levine, of the Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox congregation, said that “when a member of our community was stabbed on his way out of the synagogue, the evil we gathered to remember stopped belonging to the past. Suddenly, it was right here in the present.”

“When public officials repeatedly cast the Jewish community as a stand-in for the actions of the Israeli government, they create a climate in which Jews become targets,” he said. “When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside my synagogue or Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak. The police were there to protect him.”

“Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us,” he said.

“Jewish life in America is starting to feel like Jewish life in Europe: armed guards, bulletproof glass and the constant fear that yesterday’s rhetoric will turn into today’s assault,” Levine said. “He was just trying to pray at his synagogue, and now we’re the ones praying for his recovery.”

“If a Jew can’t feel safe walking home from shul in broad daylight on a Thursday afternoon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, then something has gone profoundly wrong—not only for the Jewish community but for our city,” he said.

Treyger, of the JCRC, said that “whether or not this attack is ultimately prosecuted as a hate crime, its impact is already being felt.”

“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” he said. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public.”

“Words matter. Leadership matters. The climate we create matters,” he said.

Jewish leaders in the city have decried Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, who recently released a video in which he called the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal” and called on federal authorities to arrest him. On the campaign trail, Mamdani promised several times to arrest the Israeli premier, who is scheduled to come to the city in September for the United Nations General Assembly, but he recently admitted that he lacks the authority to do so.

“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate. But every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said. “Responsible leadership requires lowering the temperature, not raising it.”

Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the dozens assembled that “we’re horrified and heartbroken by yesterday’s attacks.”

“But to be clear, we’re no longer surprised,” he said. “When the mayor of New York repeatedly uses his platform to relentlessly single out and demonize Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, and calls those who support it ‘monsters,’ he contributes to a climate in which Jewish New Yorkers are increasingly targeted and unsafe.”

“Mayor Mamdani, stop fanning the flames of hatred and division,” he said, raising his voice. “The consequences are not abstract. They’re playing out on our streets.”

Mark Levine, the city comptroller, said that “we are feeling hatred right now. We are feeling it on social media. We’re feeling it on the streets. We’re feeling it in colleges. We’re feeling it in politics, and we are sick and tired of it.”

“There is no New York without us,” he said. “We feel disregarded and disrespected and targeted through hateful rhetoric directed at us, directed at our students, directed at our young people, directed at our institutions, directed at our symbols.”

The comptroller, who is Jewish, added that “we are, undeniably, being disproportionately targeted again and again and again.”

“We have a right, like every other community in this city, to live without fear,” he said.

In the first month of Mamdani’s term as mayor, anti-Jewish hate crimes were up 182% compared to the prior year. Since then, the New York City Police Department has twice changed the ways it reports hate crimes, making it more difficult to compare statistics in recent months with prior years. Each month since January, Jews have been disproportionately attacked, often by manyfold, compared to their percentage of the population of the city, about 10%. Still, Jews were targets of 55% of all hate crimes in the city in the first six months of the year.

New York state attorney general Letitia James said at the press conference that “we cannot leave any one community to bear the burden of hate and fear alone.”

“I, as the attorney general, as the law-enforcement officer of the state of New York, will stand with the Jewish community and use every tool in my toolbox to protect them each and every day,” she told reporters. “Hate will not be tolerated in this city or in this state.”

James told attendees that everyone ought to “commit ourselves to doing the good and necessary work of standing together, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, with no space between us.”

New York City Council speaker Julie Menin said at the press conference that she was “standing here not only as the first Jewish speaker of the New York City Council but as a mother of four kids.”

“My daughter wears a Jewish star, and the conversations I’ve had with my husband—should she not wear the Jewish star? Is it safe for her to wear? Is it safe for our sons to wear a yarmulke? It’s shocking. It’s unacceptable,” she said. “When those of us who go to Shabbat services walk into a synagogue and there are armed guards outside, how can this be normal?”

“We have to bring the temperature down. We have to change the rhetoric,” she said. “Words matter, and we all have a responsibility to bring that temperature down.”

“As a daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I know that what is happening right now to our community cannot continue,” she said. “This just has to stop.”

Gail Brewer, a member of the New York City Council, said that “the horror of all of this never seems to end.”

“We have so many scourges. One of them is hatred, and one of them is mental illness, and we never seem to address either one correctly,” she said. “I like love, but only to a certain extent, I’ll be honest with you. When somebody commits a crime like that they have to be prosecuted to the fullest extent.”

State representative Micah Lasher said that “all of us have a right to be safe and feel safe in this city, and that is not the feeling on the Upper West Side or in New York’s Jewish community today.”

“We already have seen more than enough tragedy to know that overheated rhetoric in the political arena can lead to antisemitic violence,” he said. “I beseech all those in a position of power, including our mayor, to hear our cry from the heart, to please help take the temperature down and provide leadership that makes every New Yorker feel safe in this glorious city.”

Treyger returned to talking about the mayor at the end of the press conference.

“What might seem to be an effective communications strategy that could generate tons of clicks and views might not be a good governing strategy, because it has day-to-day implications for the people you serve and represent,” he said. “We might be hurt, but we’re not broken. You will never shatter the spirit of our people.”

“We’re going to get through it, but we are not OK,” Treyger added.

In response to a question, Goldstein said that “we want the mayor to stop demonizing the only Jewish state, using the most vilifying rhetoric and focusing solely on the only Jewish state and its supporters.”

“His video message about the prime minister was political grandstanding,” he said. “A communications strategy is not an appropriate governing strategy. You need to be responsible.”

“His words have profound, real-world consequences for us,” Goldstein said. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequences for the Jews of New York.”