On a Thursday afternoon, as Jews across the world sat on low stools and read the Book of Lamentations to mark Tisha B’Av — the fast day that mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the long catalog of catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people ever since — a man stabbed two people in the Upper West Side of Manhattan while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”The first victim, a 57-year-old man, was attacked near West 84th Street and Central Park West. The second, a 50-year-old man wearing a kippah, was stabbed in the chest near 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, half a block from The Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox synagogue where he had just finished praying the Mincha service on the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the suspect as a 51-year-old male. Both men survived. By that Friday, prosecutors had charged the attacker with hate crimes. Comptroller Mark Levine identified the victims as Chok Sung and Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus.
Tisch was careful to note that detectives were still working to determine motive, and that mental illness may have been a factor. Well, yes, I don’t think anyone who commits a crime like this is exactly mentally stable — though, of course, he should still be held responsible for his actions like anyone else. Yes, nobody yet knows with certainty what was in the attacker’s head when he lunged at a stranger leaving a synagogue on the holiest day of Jewish mourning. What we do know is the atmosphere into which that attack landed — and that atmosphere did not appear from nowhere.(Illustration by Amanda Boston Trypanis/Washington Examiner)
