200 Demonstrators Yell ‘Death to the IDF’ Outside NY Synagogue To Protest Israel Immigration Event By The Media Line Staff Hundreds of anti-Zionist protesters descended upon Manhattan’s Upper East Side’s Park East Synagogue on Wednesday, protesting an event sponsored by an organization that facilitates Jewish emigration to Israel. The New York Police Department deployed metal barricades along the block as […]
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The Media Line: 200 Demonstrators Yell ‘Death to the IDF’ Outside NY Synagogue To Protest Israel Immigration Event
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200 Demonstrators Yell ‘Death to the IDF’ Outside NY Synagogue To Protest Israel Immigration Event
By The Media Line Staff
Hundreds of anti-Zionist protesters descended upon Manhattan’s Upper East Side’s Park East Synagogue on Wednesday, protesting an event sponsored by an organization that facilitates Jewish emigration to Israel.
The New York Police Department deployed metal barricades along the block as roughly 200 activists filled the street, gathering to protest a Nefesh B’Nefesh program taking place inside the synagogue.
The chants and signs were markedly more extreme than usual, with the Times of Israel reporting that, after thousands of anti-Israel demonstrations in New York in the two years of the Israel-Hamas conflict, this is the first time “Death to the IDF” was heard repeatedly.
Regardless of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that has been in place since late September, the crowd chanted pro-intifada slogans and calls that targeted both the synagogue and its attendees. Along with “Death to the IDF,” the chants included: “We don’t want no Zionists here,” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.” At several points, activists repeated “globalize the intifada” in unison.
A masked organizer climbed onto a platform and urged the crowd to escalate its campaign against Jewish institutions. “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events,” he said, prompting demonstrators to echo his demand: “We need to make them scared! We need to make them scared! We need to make them scared.”
Across the street, a smaller cluster of Jewish counter-protesters responded with whistles, air horns, and flashlights. The two sides traded accusations of harassment while officers kept them separated.
Local Jewish leaders condemned the demonstration as an overt attack on the city’s Jewish community. Rabbi Elchanan Poupko posted on X that Park East’s senior spiritual leader is a Holocaust survivor and warned that the tone outside the synagogue recalled the antisemitic street violence of prewar Europe. He wrote, “Today, he sees outside his own synagogue the same hatred that smashed the windows of synagogues in Berlin and Vienna in 1938,” the rabbi said. “This is not about Gaza. This is an attack on the Jewish people.”
ADL New York criticized the rally as “a display of blatant antisemitism” and said it is coordinating with police “to ensure the safety of the community as protesters harass New Yorkers with chants of ‘intifada revolution’ and other threatening verbal assaults.” The organization added that “no one going to a house of worship or walking the streets of New York City should face such hatred.”
Police reported no major injuries. The demonstration highlighted what Jewish groups say has become the new reality in the city since Hamas’s October 2023 attack and the wave of anti-Israel protests that followed.