A Nefesh B’Nefesh program held Wednesday night at Park East Synagogue in New York City was met with a hostile demonstration by pro-Hamas activists who chanted violent anti-Israel slogans, including “Death to the IDF,” “Resistance is glorious,” “Intifada revolution,” and “Resistance, you make us proud; take another settler out,” according to videos circulating on social media.
PAL-Awda NY, a pro-Palestinian group that frequently targets Jewish and Israeli events, organized the protest. In its promotional material, the group accused Nefesh B’Nefesh—an organization that assists English-speaking Jews with aliyah—of serving as “an affiliate of the Israeli government” and recruiting “settlers from North America.”
Event attendees were forced to enter and exit past demonstrators holding signs such as “Zionism is a death cult,” while being met with repeated chants calling for an “intifada revolution.”
Rabbi Elchanon Poupko, who runs the Jewish World Podcast, condemned the scene, saying:
“The war in Gaza is over. This is not about Gaza; this is a war on the Jewish people. How did the NYPD permit this horror?”
The incident, community leaders warned, is a troubling sign of what life may look like in a Zohran Mamdani–run New York, where anti-Israel activism and public hostility toward Jewish institutions continue to escalate.
This protest follows a series of recent antisemitic episodes across the city. Last week, a Muslim imam at an interfaith event at City College of New York reportedly led students in walking out on the Hillel director after stating he would not “sit next to a Zionist.”
And in October, Israeli educator and IDF lecturer Rami Glickstein, 59, was violently assaulted in Manhattan, suffering a brain bleed and a broken nose in what police suspect was an antisemitic attack.
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