A 32-year-old Brooklyn woman has been arrested and charged with multiple crimes, including assault as a hate crime, after police say she stabbed a rabbi with a syringe in Manhattan’s Diamond District and attacked another Jewish man just hours earlier.
Anna Mochalova was taken into custody Saturday in connection with the attack on Yosef, a 26-year-old rabbi, who was stabbed in the back with a needle near West 47th Street and Fifth Avenue around 6 p.m. last week. Video posted by the Manhattan Shomrim shows the suspect circling a parked car while stalking Yosef, who was dressed in traditional Orthodox garb, before the attack.
Police say that about two hours before that assault, Mochalova deliberately bumped into a 37-year-old Jewish man near West 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. When the man confronted her, she spoke to him in Russian and then stabbed him in the arm with a sharp object, according to the NYPD.
Both incidents are being investigated as antisemitic hate crimes by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.
Yosef told the New York Post he believes he was singled out because he is “visibly Jewish.”
“I never met that person before,” he said. “She passes by other people. I’m visibly Jewish.”
Yosef, who asked that his last name not be used, said he was in the Diamond District, where he regularly conducts Jewish outreach, when he was attacked. He said it was the first time he had personally experienced antisemitism despite having traveled extensively around the country.
“I never experienced antisemitism anywhere in America on a personal level,” he said.
The attack did not stop him from returning to the same area the following day to continue his outreach work, which includes helping Jewish men put on tefillin, small leather boxes containing verses of the Torah.
Yosef, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, said their example motivates him to continue.
“They went on to build a Jewish home after the Holocaust,” he said. “If they could survive, I must go back to spread the light.”
The attacks come weeks after the NYPD reported that hate crimes in the city rose nearly 13% over the first nine months of the year compared with the same period last year, with anti-Jewish incidents accounting for more than half of all reported hate crimes.
Mochalova has been charged with assault, assault as a hate crime, menacing, aggravated harassment, and criminal possession of a weapon. She was awaiting arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court as of Sunday.
