NEW YORK — While the NYPD has yet to determine if an unprovoked stabbing spree on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that wounded two men, including a Jewish resident leaving a synagogue, was a hate crime, local elected officials and community leaders on Friday appeared to fear that bigotry fueled the daylight attacks.

Without directly saying that the attack outside The Jewish Center on West 86th Street — the second of the two assaults — was antisemitic, elected officials railed against a surge of anti-Jewish hate crimes across the five boroughs.

“In a city where antisemitism continues to account for the largest share of reported hate crimes, year after year, a reality we desperately wish did not exist, fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers,” former City Councilman Mark Treyger, currently the Chief Executive Officer for the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, told reporters outside The Jewish Center. “That is not normal.”

“Whether or not this attack is ultimately prosecuted as a hate crime, its impact is already being felt,” he added.

A 50-year-old congregant from The Jewish Center was stabbed in the chest during Thursday’s violent spree. According to police reports, his attacker, Raul Morales, yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he attacked the congregant and an Asian man in a separate incident a few minutes earlier.

Video of the aftermath showed the victim, identified as Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus, lying on the sidewalk, pressing a napkin against his open wound.

Charges against Morales, 51, were still pending on Friday as detectives try to unravel the motive behind the back-to-back attacks.

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch admitted Thursday that the NYPD’s initial investigation “suggests that mental health may have been a factor,” even though Morales has “no known mental health history with the NYPD.”

Attorney General Letitia James said she had spoken with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who asked her “not to draw any conclusions,” regarding Morales’ motives, but still noted she “stands with” Jewish and Asian communities.

“We should stand together against any form of hate, any act of hate in the city and state of New York. It will not be tolerated,” she said.

Julie Menin, who serves as the city council’s first Jewish speaker, said the Jewish community is “experiencing intolerable pain.”

“We cannot normalize what is happening in our city. We have to bring the temperature down. We have to change the rhetoric. Words matter, and we all have a responsibility to bring that temperature down,” said Menin, the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

“This is not acceptable to me. This is not just an Asian issue or Jewish issue,” added city council member Susan Zhuang, who is the first Chinese-American to rep Brooklyn. “The hate does not stop in one community. Hate continues when a Jewish New Yorker gets attacked, and New Yorkers are afraid. All New Yorkers are affected. Attacks motivated by hate against one is hate against all of us.”

UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein was the only one at the press conference to suggest that Mayor Zohran Mamdani may have fanned the flames of antisemitism earlier in the week when he posted a video vilifying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though New York City doesn’t have the power to arrest the Israeli leader on war crime charges.

“We want the mayor to stop demonizing the only Jewish state, using the most vilifying rhetoric, focused solely on the only Jewish state and the supporters of it,” Goldstein demanded. “Using language like ‘monstrous,’ using the most horrible, difficult language that inflames, that terrorizes, that causes people to do terrible things and creates the community against whom it’s being said, feeling really being targeted, isolated, and unsafe.”

Goldstein called the video Mamdani put out “political grandstanding.”

“We need to be responsible. This is the largest Jewish community in the world outside Israel,” he said. “His words have profound real-world consequences on us, and shame on him! Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequences for the Jews of New York. He must stop.”

Mamdani did not immediately respond when asked to comment on Goldstein’s remarks, but mentioned the attack at an unrelated event on Friday, wishing both Morales’ victims a “full and speedy recovery.”

“My heart breaks for them and their families, for what they have had to experience,” he said.

“I want to make clear that this is a city where we have no tolerance for hatred of any kind,” he continued, adding that the city will hold anyone perpetrating hate accountable.

The violence began when Morales stabbed a 57-year-old Asian man in the back at West 84th Street and Central Park West around 1:31 p.m., according to law enforcement.

A local building worker showed the Daily News an image of the victim with a knife jutting from his back.

“He was on the corner of West 84th Street, bleeding,” said the worker, who asked that his name be withheld. “He was squatting with the knife sticking out of his back. Crazy man, crazy.”

Morales ran off and reappeared minutes later around the corner from The Jewish Center where he stabbed his Jewish victim in the stomach with a screwdriver.

Grunhaus had just attended Tisha B’Av services and was exiting The Jewish Center from a rear entrance when Morales jumped him, a police source said.

Juan Garcia, a local restaurant worker, watched as the stabber attacked the second victim.

“He was a Jewish guy with a yarmulke,” Garcia, 26, said. “He was on his knees. He was bleeding from the right side. The screwdriver was on the floor.”

Both victims were taken to Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital where they’re expected to survive.

“According to victim and witness statements, Morales yelled “Allahu Akbar” during both attacks,” Tisch said.

Allahu Akbar means “God is Most Great” in Arabic.

“I’m just in shock,” Grunhaus’ relative, Avi Grunhaus, who lives in Maryland, told the Daily News. “I got in my car, and I should be in the city in a few hours.”

At Grunhaus’ building, a short walk from The Jewish Center, his 65-year-old neighbor described the victim as “a very nice man” who keeps to himself.

“He’s very introverted. It’s just a terrible disaster. I can only imagine how he feels,” said the neighbor, who only gave her name as Helen. “He’s a very long-term resident here. I know he’s a very wonderful man. It’s terrible and especially in this neighborhood it’s very rare.

Cops alerted to the attacks were flagged down by a good Samaritan who spotted Morales entering a NYCHA apartment building on Amsterdam Ave. near W. 89th St. Cops arrested Morales inside the building, where he lived, according to police sources.

Witnesses told The News a UPS delivery worker was the good Samaritan who tailed Morales and alerted police.

“I want to commend the bravery of a good Samaritan who led our officers to the location where the perpetrator was hiding, as well as our NYPD cops who brought an end to the incident without further injuries,” Tisch said.

Morales has been arrested seven times in New York City, including multiple busts for drug-related offenses, police sources said.

The NYPD investigated 178 antisemitic hate crimes in the city by the end of June, four more than the first six months of 2025, a 2% increase. Jewish hate crimes, however, represent 55% of all hate crimes investigated in the five boroughs, officials said.

In comparison, hate crimes against Muslims jumped by 50% in the first half of the year, from 14 last year to 21, officials said.

_____

With Josephine Stratman

_____

©2026 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.