Hate crimes against the Jewish Community in New York City increased by more than 200 percent in October compared to last year’s same period.

According to a NYPD press release, in the weeks after Hamas’s surprise terror attacks on Israel, its Hate Crime Task Force recorded a “spike” of 214 percent in anti-Jewish crimes compared to last year’s same period.

“Hate is not welcome in our city.” “I have repeatedly sat with Jewish leaders in the last month and heard them express their fears about wearing a yarmulke,” Adams stated in a response to this increase. While we have seen fewer hate crime incidents in the city overall this year, it seems that our Jewish neighbors are more targeted based on their religion. This is unacceptable. The NYPD is directing more resources towards synagogues and houses of worship in order to keep them safe.

Jewish New Yorkers reported being spat upon and harassed in the subway. Jewish students in local colleges were mobbed and forced, in the case Cooper Union, to seek refuge in a library. In upstate New York a Cornell University student was arrested after threatening to kill Jews on campus.

The FBI’s Christopher Wray warned on Capitol Hill late in October that the Middle East conflict had led to an unprecedented rise in antisemitism. The director said that the threat was reaching “historic levels” in his Halloween address to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Wray noted that terrorists target the Jewish community across the board, despite the fact that it represents less than 2.5 percent of the total population.

This is not the time to panic. It is time to be vigilant. We should not stop going about our daily lives, such as to school, places of worship and so on, but we must be vigilant.

The actions of Hamas will inspire us in a way we haven’t experienced since ISIS established its so-called Caliphate.

Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, has allocated $75 million for law enforcement to patrol and protect religious places. You can oppose Israel’s reaction to the attack on its people and still be adamantly opposed against terrorism, Hamas antisemitism and hatred in all forms, said the Democratic leader in October, as a series of antisemitic incidents made national headlines.

The unit reported 69 hate crimes against the Jewish community during this time period, which was a vastly higher number than the eight anti-Muslim incidents.