A Hanukkah gathering in a rabbi's Rockland County home was violently interrupted by a man who stabbed attendees with a large knife on Saturday night, according to police. Five people were wounded in the attack at Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg's house, which is next to the Monsey, NY synagogue he leads, Congregation Netzach Yisroel.
"This is terrorism. It is domestic terrorism," Governor Andrew Cuomo said during a Sunday morning press conference at Ramapo Town Hall in Suffern.
The assailant fled the scene, but a witness managed to see his license plate number and give it to police. NYPD officers arrested the suspect, Grafton Thomas, 37, of Greenwood Lake, at 144th Street and 7th Avenue. He was charged of five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary, and held on $5 million bail.
Police received calls about the stabbing just after 10 p.m. Apparently the suspect entered the home on Forshay Road, and, according to the WCBS 2, "pulled out a machete to attack the victims during a Chanukah celebration" and "reportedly chased after and stabbed victims as they fled the synagogue before running off and escaping in a gray Nissan Sentra."
A witness described the attacker as wearing a scarf over his face and a hooded jacket. "He took out his knife, sword from a holder and started hitting people back and forth. Nothing, he didn’t say anything. He screamed after me when I came out here, he screamed after me, ‘Hey you, I’ll get you,'" the witness said to WCBS 2. "He moved to the front door. He could go straight into the kitchen and the dining room’s the first thing. First, he went into the dining room and hit a few people there. Then he went into the kitchen and hit one guy there, and then he came back to the dining room."
Recalling the panic, Aron Kohn, 65, told the NY Times, "I was praying for my life. He started attacking people right away as soon as he came in the door. We didn’t have time to react at all." He added, "We saw him pull a knife out of a case. It was about the size of a broomstick."
Two of the victims remain hospitalized, and one, Cuomo said, "is still in very serious and critical condition with wounds to the head." One of the other four victims was Rabbi Rottenberg's son, who is recovering.
During Thomas‘s court appearance on Sunday, a Rockland County prosecutor said that when NYPD officers pulled him over during a traffic stop, Thomas wascovered in blood.
Thomas pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Monsey, about 35 miles from New York City, is an Orthodox Jewish enclave in Rockland County. Law enforcement noted there are 90,000 people of Jewish faith in Rockland County. During the press conference, Cuomo blasted the recent spate in anti-Semitic hate crimes, "I wish I could say that this was an isolated situation. Unfortunately, it is not. We have had 13 acts of anti-Semitism since December 8th in New York State. I'd like to say it's only those 13."
A number of anti-Semitic attacks—at least eight—have occurred in New York City, prompting the NYPD to increase its presence in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.
Cuomo also acknowledged, "The truth is we've had incidents all across the state against the LGBTQ community, against the African-American community, the Latino community," and pointed out that New York State has the "toughest hate crime laws in the United States of America and we are going to enforce them to the full extent of the law."
After declaring these kind of the incidents to be "terrorism," Cuomo said, "I want this state to be the first state to have a domestic terrorism law to express how ignorant this is, how intolerant it is and how criminal it is. And I'll be proposing that law for this state."
Following Cuomo's remarks, Rockland County Sheriff Lewis Falco thanked local, state, NYC, and federal law enforcement for aiding in the investigation—and also criticized some of the upcoming bail reform, which starts in the new year and means that judges will no longer set bail for almost all misdemeanors and non-violent felonies.
"Part of the criminal justice reforms, there's hate crimes where there's no bail. I honestly believe that our Legislature needs to go back and start looking at some of these things," Falco said. "I think reforms are good but I do think some of them have to be looked at to go even further [with the governor's] domestic terrorism" initiatives.
In the meantime, the Anti-Defamation League says it's working with Jewish leaders on encouraging reports of hate crimes. Evan Bernstain, the ADL's director for New Jersey and New York, said to CNN,"There's a fear of reporting. There's a fear of retaliation, or they just don't have the understanding of how to report. So what happens is in a place like here in Rockland County, you maybe will only show a few or handful of incidents that have taken place ... when in reality—we believe, based in our conversations with orthodox leadership—there's far more of that happening."
Update: This article has been updated to clarify the suspect‘s name as Grafton Thomas, and not Thomas Grafton as earlier stated.
