Man arrested for assault on Jews in New York City subway

Xeryus Mack indicted on several charges for allegedly grabbing Hasidic man’s neck and threatening to kill him

NEW YORK — A suspect was arrested on Thursday for assaulting Jews on a New York City subway earlier this week in an incident caught on video.

Xeryus Mack, from Brooklyn, was charged with attempted assault, menacing and attempted harassment, the NYPD said.

Mack, 28, was arrested on Thursday afternoon in northwest Brooklyn.

In footage of the Monday night incident, two men approach a group of Hasidic men, hurl insults at them, grab a Jewish man’s neck and threaten to kill him.

The incident took place Monday at around 8:40 p.m. on a southbound 3 train near the Nostrand Avenue station in Brooklyn. There were no injuries, the NYPD said.

A man identified as Xeryus Mack has been arrested three other times in the past year for charges including intent to damage property, burglary, trespassing, larceny, resisting arrest, assault and harassment, court records showed.

COL Live, a news outlet based in Crown Heights, the home base of the Chabad Hasidic movement, said the targets of the attack were a group of Chabad members who were returning to Brooklyn from Jewish outreach activities in Manhattan’s Union Square.

Chabad, which has centers in cities worldwide, also organized the Hanukkah event that was targeted in last week’s mass terror shooting in Sydney, Australia.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams had said the incident was being investigated as a hate crime, but the charges listed do not include any hate crime accusations.

The head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which covers the subway system, had called the incident an “apparent bias assault,” adding, “This kind of hateful behavior has no place on the subway or anywhere, and is deeply offensive to New Yorkers.”

In a separate incident, the NYPD on Wednesday said it was investigating an alleged antisemitic stabbing in Crown Heights in an attack that was also filmed.

Police said the incident was being investigated as a hate crime assault and that the attacker “made anti-Jewish statements and then proceeded to stab the victim in the chest with a knife.”

Jews are targeted in hate crimes far more than any other group in New York City.

So far this year, there have been at least 287 antisemitic incidents reported to police, out of 516 total hate crimes, according to a tally of NYPD data. The antisemitic incidents amount to 56% of the total hate crimes in the city. Jews are roughly 12% of the city population.

The hate crimes figures are preliminary and subject to change, if, for example, an incident that had appeared discriminatory turns out to have had another motivation.

Despite the high number of reported incidents, convictions for hate crimes are rare because prosecutors need to prove that bias was a motivating factor, a high legal bar.