The man accused of attacking a woman and a security guard at Central Synagogue, a prominent New York City congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during Friday night services, had filled his Facebook page with posts about Israel and Judaism in the months leading up to the attack — and, according to his aunt, had expressed a desire to convert to the Jewish faith.

“He’s mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism] — that’s what he’s said,” Myriam Montes, the aunt of Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post.

“Given what happened, he might not have been in his right mind,” she said. However, she added that she had not spoken with her nephew in three months.

On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes, he reposted a video comparing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Other videos reposted on the page focused on Jewish and Israeli topics. One featured a Jewish man disputing claims that the Talmud contains disparaging remarks about Jesus. In 2024, he posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” Another reposted video featured Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.

The page also reposted several videos from Ruhama’s Food, a popular Israeli social media account.  

The Facebook page’s recent posts are more disjointed. They include screenshots showing attempts to translate seemingly incoherent Spanish text into Hebrew.

Police said Montes had three prior arrests before the Central Synagogue attack, all of which were for robbery.

Montes was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count of criminal mischief as a hate crime. He is expected to appear in court on August 20.

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(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.

The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.

“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.

Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”

“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.

While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.

For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”

“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”

“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.

The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”

“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.

Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”

“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.

Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.

“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.

Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.

The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.

Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.

“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”

Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.

In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.

But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.

Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.

Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.

That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.

“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.

Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.

The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.

The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.

At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.

“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”

They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.

The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.

Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”

Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.

But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.

Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.

Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.

The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.

Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.

“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”

“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”

Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.

For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.

Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.

But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.

“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”

Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.

“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”

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