Mass stabbing at Chanukah event in New York State

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An intruder with a knife stormed into the home of a Hasidic rabbi in a New York suburb on Saturday, stabbing and wounding five people, officials said.

The home of the rabbi, Chaim Rottenberg, is in Monsey, N.Y., an area with a large population of ultra-Orthodox Jews

The attack happened during a Hanukkah party around 10 p.m., when a man entered the home and stabbed the five people before fleeing, officials said.
Police officials announced around midnight that the attacker had been caught, but they did not immediately indicate whether they were investigating the violence as a bias crime.

“The suspect fled the scene, but he is in custody at this time,” police officials said.

Yossi Gestetner, a co-founder of the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council for the Hudson Valley region, said five people were stabbed in the attack, and two were critically wounded. Among the victims was a son of the rabbi.

“The house had many dozens of people in there,” Mr. Gestetner said in a phone interview. “It was a Hanukkah celebration.”

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 Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed just steps away from a local synagogue as he 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 towns northwest of New York City, has a population of more than 300,000 people. About 31 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 particularly in recent years as Hasidic families from Queens and Brooklyn, priced out of their neighborhoods, sought to build communities elsewhere.

A man armed with a large knife, possibly a machete, walked into a home in Monsey around 10 p.m. and started attacking

Between 50 and 70 people were gathered in the home — which borders on a synagogue and is believed to belong to a local rabbi — for a menorah lighting at the time of the stabbing, which occurred on the seventh night of Hanukkah.

One witness told WCBS 880's News Director Tim Scheld that those in the home tried to fight back and started throwing tables and chairs at the suspect

Another witness said after the man was chased out of the home he tried to make his way into the synagogue, which was locked.

The suspect fled the scene in a gray Nissan Sentra. Authorities said the vehicle and suspect were located two hours later by the NYPD in Harlem. The man has been taken into custody.

The conditions of the victims have not been released. Two people were taken to Good Samaritan Hospital and three were taken to Westchester Medical Center. One person is believed to have been stabbed in the chest.

The NYPD's Counterterrorism Unit is monitoring the situation and police patrols are being increased "in sensitive areas" across the city.

This is the second attack on the Jewish community in Monsey in the last two months.

An Orthodox Jewish man was slashed steps away from a synagogue in November.

There are still no arrests in that incident.

A 37-year-old suspect nabbed in Harlem for the anti-Semitic Chanukah stabbing in Monsey, N.Y. has been transferred from an NYPD stationhouse to Rockland County to face charges.

Thomas Grafton, who lives in Greenwood Lake about 20 miles from Monsey,, will be charged with four counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary, officials said at a Sunday morning press conference. He is scheduled to be arraigned late Sunday in Rockland County.

Sources say Grafton has just one prior arrest, which is sealed, making the bloody machete rampage inside an Orthodox rabbi’s home in which five people were wounded all the more incomprehensible.

Gov. Cuomo on Sunday morning visited with the rabbi who hosted the party.

it’s a very sad situation,” Cuomo told reporters afterwards.
“When he talks about what happened it’s even more frightening than the reports you read in the newspaper."

Grafton, armed with a machete, allegedly entered the home in Monsey’s Forshay neighborhood around 9:50 p.m. Saturday and stabbed five people. Three were treated and released while two remain hospitalized in serious or critical condition.

A witness who recorded the suspect’s license plate and alerted authorities is credited with helping make the quick arrest possible.

License plate readers picked up the Nissan Sentra crossing the George Washington Bridge just after 11 p.m. Saturday and NYPD cops nabbed the suspect in Harlem.

Grafton lives with his father, who has an auto body shop, sources said.

Any word on the guy's motivation?

The man accused of going on a stabbing rampage at a Hanukkah celebration in upstate Monsey is “not a terrorist” — he’s just mentally ill — family friends claimed Sunday in an apparent response to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statements earlier in the day that the attack was an “act of domestic terrorism.”

Grafton Thomas — who is accused of storming into a rabbi’s house in Monsey Saturday night and wounding five people with a machete — is “not a violent person,” according to his pastor of 10 years, Reverend Wendy Paige of the Hudson Highlands Cooperative Parish.

“Grafton is not a terrorist, he is a man who has mental illness in America and the systems that be have not served him well,” Paige said.

“I have been his pastor for a long time and I have seen him, he is not a violent person, he is a confused person.”

Thomas, 38, has suffered from mental illness for more than 20 years and has been in and out of hospitals for treatment, according to Paige, who did not say what condition he had been diagnosed with or what medications he’d been prescribed.

Paige appeared to be responding to Gov. Andrew Cuomo calling the attack on Jewish worshipers an “act of domestic terrorism” on Sunday morning.

She spoke to reporters down the block from the Greenwood Lake, NY, home where Thomas lives with his mother.

A friend of the mom, Taleea Collins, said outside the home that Thomas is “a lovely person.”

“Grafton has always been a loving, loving man towards me. He calls me ‘auntie’ sometimes,” she claimed. “He’s just a lovely person. I’ve never seen him be violent and I know that he suffers from mental illnesses.”

“He’s not a terrorist he’s a loving loving man, with a lot of creativity and just a wonderful spirit,” Collins added.

Thomas was held on $5 million bail Sunday after a prosecutor alleged he was found covered in blood by the NYPD in Harlem and tried to cover up his role in the attack by dousing himself in bleach.

The mayor of Greenwood Lake, Jesse Dwyer, told The Post that Grafton lived like a hermit in recent years.

“He almost seems to have been isolated in his home for the last couple of years,” said Dwyer, who said he grew up with the accused anti-Semite.

“It’s a tight-knit community and when things stand out you tend to notice them, and nothing stood out about him,” Dwyer said.

Federal prosecutors on Monday filed hate crimes charges against the man accused of charging into a rabbi’s New York home with a machete, wounding five as they celebrated Hanukkah.

A criminal complaint points to Grafton Thomas’s handwritten journals and online search history as evidence the 37-year-old sought to target Jews, a day after Thomas’ family said the suspect has “no known history of anti-Semitism” and attributed his alleged actions to “profound mental illness.”

Authorities who arrested Thomas hours after his Saturday night rampage in a suburb north of New York City found him with blood on his clothes and two weapons, including a machete, the complaint says. A cellphone recovered from his car revealed recent searches for phrases like “German Jewish Temples near me” and “Why did Hitler hate the Jews,” the document states.

The suspect’s browser history showed queries related to Nazis, Jews and synagogues dating back to at least Nov. 9, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

Why did Hitler hate the Jews” was searched four times, the complaint says. The suspect also searched for Jewish and “Zionist” temples in New York and New Jersey, it says.
And a day before Saturday’s stabbing, the complaint says, Thomas accessed an article on New York City’s decision to ramp up police presence in multiple Jewish neighborhood amid fears of anti-Semitic violence.

Journals discovered in Thomas’s home also include anti-Semitic sentiments, an FBI officer writes in the federal complaint.

Some writings refer to Adolf Hitler and “Nazi Culture” alongside drawings of a swastika and Star of David, the document says, while others question “why [people] mourned for anti-Semitism when there is Semitic genocide.”

Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a longtime immigration hawk, on Monday attempted to link the attack to unauthorized immigration.

“The attacker is the U.S. Citizen son of an illegal alien who got amnesty under the 1986 amnesty law for illegal immigrants. Apparently, American values did not take hold among this entire family, at least this one violent, and apparently bigoted, son,” Cuccinelli said in a now-deleted tweet Monday. Signed by President Ronald Reagan and passed on a bipartisan basis in Congress, the landmark 1986 law granted legal status to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country before 1982.

DHS, the domestic anti-terror agency where Cuccinelli is second-in-command, did not immediately respond to requests for information about his allegations. Hours later, Cuccinelli’s tweet was deleted.

According to Monday’s federal complaint, when the attacker entered the rabbi’s house dozens of congregants were inside celebrating the end of Shabbat and the seventh night of Hanukkah, lighting candles and reciting prayers. He closed the door behind him and said, “No one is leaving.”

He unsheathed a machete, described by witnesses as a sword nearly the size of a broomstick, and started slashing at random, moving through the entryway, then into the dining room and eventually toward the kitchen, where dozens of people — from children to senior citizens — were trying to flee through a back door.

Yisroel Kraus, a 26-year-old teacher who was celebrating Hanukkah at the rabbi’s home with his family, said it was lucky that people had already started to filter out for the night.

If he had come 10 minutes earlier, the place would have been packed,” said Kraus. “No way to move. No way to run. It was a miracle. It was a Hanukkah miracle.”

A new federal complaint was unveiled against Grafton Thomas, the Monsey Hanukkah stabbing suspect, as Thomas’ mother joined her son's attorney Monday afternoon for a news conference in Goshen following his indictment.

Grafton Thomas' mother Kim sat silently but visibly upset as her son's attorney, high-profile civil rights attorney Michael Sussman, and their family pastor described a long history of alleged mental illness.

Sussman says the 37 year-old from Greenwood Lake has been hospitalized for mental illness. He noted the Monsey stabbing suspect, a former Marine who is now charged with federal hate crimes, was prescribed multiple medications for serious depression. Sussman says he's requested a 30-day mental health evaluation after speaking to Grafton behind bars, who he claims appears to be suffering from hallucinations and is allegedly hearing voices.

"I spent about 35 minutes speaking with Grafton Thomas this morning and while obviously I can't disclose the detail of that conversation, I can tell you that I heard nothing in that conversation that confirms in any way, shape or matter that he is a domestic terrorist,” said Sussman.

The Hasidic hero who hurled a coffee table at a machete-wielding invader during a Hanukkah celebration proved as humble Tuesday as he was fearless three days earlier.

Joseph Gluck was honored with the Ramapo Freedom Award during a ceremony where he cited luck and divine intervention more than his own courage for limiting the damage during the Saturday night attack at a rabbi’s Rockland County home. The assailant managed to gash five victims, a number that could have easily climbed higher.

“If the attacker had come five minutes earlier, the room would have been packed with people,” said Gluck, dressed in his religion’s traditional black coat and matching hat for the news conference. “Five minutes later, all women and children. He came at the right time. Thank God there were no fatalities.”

As noted by several speakers at the ceremony, the 32-year-old lifelong resident of Ramapo deserved some credit too. When a homicidal, anti-Semitic man waving an 18-inch blade burst into the Monsey home shortly before 10 p.m., things instantly turned to chaos.

“No one is leaving," the man announced while swinging the machete through the air.

Gluck said the assailant never said another word, and even ignored his shouts encouraging the man to end the rampage. Suspect Grafton Thomas, who kept a journal rife with anti-Semitic hate speech, only stopped the attack after the bearded Gluck hurled a coffee table at him.

Gluck also managed to steer a child to safety and lure Thomas out of the home before anyone else was injured.

The suspect, his face obscured by a scarf, then climbed into his car and fled south toward New York City. Authorities said Gluck followed Thomas, noting the fleeing perpetrator’s license plate number and a description of the vehicle.

The suspect was in custody within two hours in Harlem based on the information provided by Gluck, police said.

Ramapo Town Council Supervisor Michael Specht said God wasn’t alone in sparing more Jewish victims from the madman’s blade.

“I think Joseph is a very modest person,” said Specht, who presented Gluck with the award in the shape of an eagle holding an American flag. “Not somebody who seeks the spotlight, but ... a humble person who knew one thing: He had to save everyone around him."