Ed Day, county executive for Rockland County, which is northwest of New York City, condemned the attack.
“Law enforcement in Rockland will leave no stone unturned as they bring those guilty of this crime to swift and severe justice,” Mr. Day said in a statement.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he had ordered the State Police hate crimes task force
to investigate the stabbings.
The attack came after a surge in anti-Semitic violence in the New York region. On Friday, the police in New York City stepped up patrols in three Brooklyn neighborhoods
after what officials called an “alarming ”Increase in incidents.
Last month, an an Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed
just steps away from a local synagogue as he was walking to morning prayers. The synagogue’s surveillance cameras showed a vehicle stopping near the man and then the attack on him, according to a manager there.
No one has been charged in that attack, and officials have not determined that it was a bias crime.
Rockland County, a collection of five northwest towns of New York City, has more than (*****************************************************, people. About (percent of the population is Jewish, according to the state, and the county has one of the largest concentrations of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the country.
The ultra-Orthodox population has surged in recent years as Hasidic families from Queens and Brooklyn, priced out of their neighborhoods, moved to the suburbs.
“The community is terrified,” said Evan Bernstein, the New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was at the crime scene in Monsey on Saturday night. “They are very, very scared.”
Orthodox Jews in Monsey were already rattled by recent assaults against Jews that took place in the last week in Brooklyn, as well as a
deadly anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City this month
Three people, two of them Orthodox Jews, were killed at the market, which was at the center of a growing Hasidic Jewish community in Jersey City.
Officials later declared the attack an act of domestic terrorism and said it was fueled by the assailants’ anti-Semitic beliefs.
While officials have not yet said whether they are investigating the stabbing on Saturday night as a hate crime, Mr. Bernstein said Orthodox community members he had spoken with felt the circumstances made them feel as though they were being targeted.
“This spate of assaults that we saw this past week was unlike anything I’ve experienced in my six and a half years at the ADL, ”he said. “And then, to have that really bookended with what happened in Jersey City and now, here in Monsey.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.
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