Riverdale Jewish students join Upper East Side prayer gathering amid antisemitism concerns

Editor's note 9/25/26: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed quotes from Yona Benjamin to Matt Heisler.

Hundreds of Jewish students from Riverdale’s Salanter Akiba of Riverdale, or SAR, and Manhattan’s Ramaz School streamed off yellow school buses on the Upper East Side Sept. 18, gathering outside Gracie Mansion with prayer books in hand.

Organizers said the gathering of middle through high school students was meant to give them a public way to express Jewish pride, respond to concerns about antisemitism and affirm their ties to Israel. The decision to pray outside Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence, however, evoked some opposition within the Modern Orthodox community as word of the gathering spread in the days before.

The morning began with a student-led Shacharit — the traditional Jewish morning prayer service — before giving way to speeches and a kumzitz, or communal singalong. Voices rose together for “Shema Koleinu” and “Am Yisrael Chai” as students from Jewish schools filled 88th Street, near Gracie Mansion.

Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of SAR Academy, said the gathering was not meant as a confrontation.

“This is a peaceful prayer vigil — it’s not a protest or a demonstration,” he said, although he added that the location was deliberate. It was meant, he said, to let students make two parts of their identity visible at once, both their attachment to New York and their connection to Israel.

“We love the city, we love the state of Israel,” he told the crowd. “We don’t think that’s a contradiction, and we’re here to stay.”

Speakers challenged Mamdani over his rhetoric about Israel, saying some Jewish New Yorkers have felt less safe or respected.

At a Sept.16 briefing, Mamdani said he would likely be elsewhere in the city while the service took place when asked specifically about the planned student gathering.

“I welcome them,” he said, adding that whether participants considered it a vigil or a protest, they were free to gather outside Gracie Mansion.

For many of the students who came down from Riverdale, however, the morning was also about what it meant to be visibly Jewish among hundreds of their peers. Annie Crog, an SAR Academy eighth grader, stood before the crowd and spoke about the role students could play even before they were old enough to cast a ballot.

“I want to feel safe being openly Jewish in my city,” she said. “I want to be able to wear my magen David, go to synagogue and go to school without being afraid of antisemitism.”

The event was not without controversy from within the Jewish community, sparking a petition signed by more than 380 SAR and Ramaz students, parents, alumni and others. It argued that the location would inevitably turn the morning into a political statement against the mayor.

Holding the event at his residence, the petition said, would “needlessly inflame tensions between the mayor and the Modern Orthodox Jewish community” and cast the community as united against Mamdani when its members are not.

It also objected to putting students front and center in a dispute they hadn’t chosen, warning that the event risked “using the children of our community as political pawns” by presenting them as leading a cause that adults had actually designed.

That the objection came from within the whole school’s community, rather than outside it, was itself notable, said SAR alumnus Kevin Danishefsky, who signed the letter. Danishefsky said his opposition centered on the students involved. He didn’t dispute that organizers meant the gathering as a vigil rather than a protest, but doubted the venue was incidental.

“I don’t agree with putting the students in that position,” he said.

Yona Benjamin, another alumnus, said seeing news coverage of the plan was enough to convince him to sign.

“This gathering struck me as being political theater, and not necessarily the sort of serious, thoughtful civic engagement that had been modeled to me as an SAR student,” he said.

He also said that choosing Gracie Mansion over a more neutral site, like Central Park or City Hall, was a “personal appeal to the mayor.”

Rabbi Joshua Lookstein, Ramaz’s associate head of school, said the mayor’s absence wouldn’t undercut the point of the gathering, and he would hear the message whether he was present or not.

Krauss defended the decision in an essay published before the service, writing that students had been told what the gathering would involve and families were given the opportunity to opt out.

Stella Zavodnick, a senior at SAR High School in attendance, described a Jewish identity that had once felt almost effortless — Shabbat dinners, holidays and Hebrew words woven into ordinary conversation — but became more complicated after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the continuous conflict that followed.

“Being Jewish started to feel like something we had to think about — where we said it and who we said it to,” she said.

But, she said, Jewish history had taught her about persistence through periods of fear and displacement.

“My Jewish identity didn’t begin with a hard year, and it isn’t defined by one either,” she said. 

That connection between Jewish identity and Israel became more personal as the program turned back toward prayer.

Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale stepped forward holding the military identification tags of his grandchildren, who served in the Israeli military, before leading a tefillah for chayalim, a prayer for soldiers.

“May all who go out, each one come back well and healthy and alive,” he said.

The event closed just as it began, with hundreds of voices joining together.

Students and adults locked arms and swayed through “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, later placing their hands over their hearts for “The Star-Spangled Banner” before making their way back toward the yellow school buses and returning to class.