Rafi Hasid was stoical as he stood outside Miriam, his Israeli-inspired restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, contemplating the antisemitic graffiti that was daubed on its outer wall the previous night.
“As my mother would say, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s not nice,” Hasid told The Algemeiner on Wednesday, as diners arriving for lunch were greeted by the site of an NYPD patrol car outside the restaurant, along with the words “F— Jews” scrawled three times in large black letters.
The outrage at Miriam amounts to one more antisemitism statistic in New York, where attacks on Jews have risen by an eye-watering 275 percent over the last year.
In January alone, 15 antisemitic incidents were recorded, while several more have been reported this month, among them an assault on a young Jewish man in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the vandalizing of a dental office in Forest Hills, Queens — again with the words “F— Jews” scrawled in large black letters.
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