Federal law enforcement officials on Wednesday charged a New Jersey man with hate crimes for a violent attack on four Jewish men, in which two were hit by a vehicle that had been carjacked by the first victim. The incident took place in and around Lakewood, NJ, home to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States.
Prosecutors say Dion Marsh, 27, forced a Jewish man out of his car in Lakewood on April 8, assaulted the man and stole his car. Later that day, Mr. Marsh used another car to deliberately hit another Jewish man, breaking several of his bones. Shortly after, he returned to the first car and used it to deliberately hit two more Jewish men in Lakewood and nearby Jackson Township, one of whom he also stabbed in the chest with a knife.
According to Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer, Mr. Marsh was arrested just hours after the attacks and has been incarcerated ever since on a range of charges, including attempted murder, carjacking and terrorism. Marsh is being defended by the Ocean County Public Defender’s Office, which declined to comment on his case on Wednesday.
“We are prepared to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Marsh intended to terrorize the Jewish community in Lakewood and Jackson on April 8,” Billhimer said in a statement. “This young man will be held responsible for this behavior.”
When he was arrested, Mr. Marsh said the Lakewood attacks “must be done” because “the Hasidic Jews” were “the real devils,” according to court documents. He also told officers that Hasidic Jews were “100 percent” hostile to his religion, which is not specified in the documents.
All the victims were Orthodox Jews wearing religious clothing that made them visibly identifiable as Jews, prosecutors said. The New Jersey episode is part of a larger nationwide trend where visibly identifiable Jews have suffered the most from anti-Semitic attacks in recent years, particularly Orthodox Jews who wear traditional clothing such as dark suits or skullcaps or who have long beards or side locks. .
Jewish communities in the United States have been plagued in recent years by concerns about a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, especially in the wake of fatal shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, California, in 2019.
No organization specifically tracks the number of attacks on Orthodox Jews, but community leaders said the pattern was clear.
That’s especially true in the New York area, home to about one million Jews and often considered the world’s largest Jewish population center outside of Israel.
There has been a steady stream of anti-Semitic episodes in the region in recent years, from attacks on Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to vandalized synagogues.
But Orthodox Jews have been the target of the area’s most violent and deadly attacks, including a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City that killed three people and a knife attack at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, NY that left five injured. .
In a 2020 congressional testimony, Nathan J. Diament, the executive director for public policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, said that “it is the most visible Jews” in the community “who are the most subject to these verbal abuses.” and physical attacks.”
“Concern about this new reality is present in Orthodox Jewish communities in all your districts and across the country,” said Mr Diament. In an interview on Wednesday, he said the community “greatly appreciates that federal authorities have filed a hate crime complaint”.
“This criminal was clearly targeting Orthodox Jews, who — especially in the Lakewood area — are very easy to identify by how they dress,” he said.
Hate crimes against Jews had been on the rise for several years through 2020, when the number of incidents fell 28 percent from the previous year to 683, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Lakewood has a large and growing Orthodox Jewish community, many members of which have relocated to the leafy town about 70 miles south of New York City in the past 20 years after being sold out.
That steady migration has made Lakewood one of the most populous cities in New Jersey, with a population rising to more than 100,000 in 2017 from about 60,000 in 2000, according to census data.
The explosive growth has sparked a series of controversies over issues like zoning and school funding that some believe are motivated by anti-Semitism.
In his congressional statement, Mr. Diament elected officials in towns near Lakewood specifically of “taking anti-Orthodox actions” and said they had “tried to use zoning and land use regulations to try and prevent Orthodox Jews from moving to their towns.”
In 2020, the Justice Department filed a civil rights lawsuit against Jackson Township and its planning board, saying they had used zoning and land use ordinances to target Orthodox Jews by restricting religious schools and banning religious boarding schools. The New Jersey Attorney General filed a state suit against Jackson Township the following year.
