Five injured in stabbing at rabbi's home in NY state
The Rockland County Sheriff's Office said that five people had been stabbed in Monsey, a community in the primarily Hasidic Jewish area of Rockland County some 40 kilometres north of New York City.
The suspect was arrested several hours later by police in New York City, it said.
He faces five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary and is set to be arraigned in Ramapo Town Court on Sunday, according to local police.
A man wearing a scarf reportedly entered the home of a rabbi in Monsey shortly before 10 pm (0300 GMT Sunday) and stabbed five people, according to the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council (OJPAC) for the area.
The local OJPAC said that two people had been critically injured and taken to hospital, and one victim had been stabbed at least six times.
A witness told the New York Times that the perpetrator began attacking people as soon as he came in the door.
"We saw him pull a knife out of a case," Aron Kohn told the newspaper. "It was about the size of a broomstick."
Visiting Monsey on Sunday morning New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said the stabbing should be considered "an act of domestic terrorism."
"Let's call it what it is - these people are domestic terrorists," he said, referring to a series of anti-Semitic incidents in the past few weeks in New Jersey and New York, including Saturday's attack.
"This is intolerance meets ignorance meets illegality," Cuomo said, adding "it is an American cancer on the body politic."
The attorney general for New York state, Letitia James, said "there is zero tolerance for acts of hate of any kind and we will continue to monitor this horrific situation."
Israel's acting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack. "We will cooperate in any way with local authorities in order to uproot this phenomenon," he said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting, referring to anti-Semitic incidents.
Israel's Holocaust Remembrance centre Yad Vashem said it was "deeply concerned by the news and images emerging from the scene of yet another anti-Semitic attack."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, urged US President Donald Trump to instruct the FBI to create a task force "in [the] wake of unending attacks against Jews."
The centre also called on black leaders to speak out against a series of hate crimes committed in New York and New Jersey. According to the OJPAC, the suspect in the stabbing was an African-American man.
Four people were killed in early December in an hours-long shoot-out in New Jersey that targeted a Jewish supermarket.
According to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, the shooters, who were killed in the shoot-out, had "expressed interest" in the Black Hebrew Israelites, which has been labelled a hate group.
Heightened security measures are already in force in nearby New York City after several attacks on Jewish people that appear to be anti-Semitically motivated.
Extra police officers were deployed to the neighbourhoods of Borough Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg, all areas with large Jewish populations, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a Friday tweet.
New York is home to one of the biggest Jewish communities in the world. About a third of the population of Rockland County is Jewish, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews.
