Curtis Sliwa, who founded Guardian Angels in New York City in 1979, said that patrols would start in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, and expand to Williamsburg and Borough Park.

Edited by: Fern Sidman

A private, volunteer-based and unarmed crime-prevention group said it would start patrolling parts of Brooklyn on Sunday following a string of anti-Semitic attacks in the borough.

Curtis Sliwa, who founded Guardian Angels in New York City in 1979, said patrols would start in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, and expand to Williamsburg and Borough Park later in the day.

Hours earlier, on Saturday night, five people were stabbed in an attack at a Hanukkah event in Monsey, N.Y., upstate in Rockland County.

There has been a total of eight attacks on Jews in Brooklyn since Dec. 13, according to police. On Friday, a woman slapped three females in Brooklyn and told police officers that it was because they were Jewish. 

For the second time in three days, a woman in Brooklyn has been freed without bail on a charge of assaulting three females in Brooklyn and told police officers that it was because they were Jewish. 

The woman is identified as 30-year-old Tiffany Harris. She was accused of carrying out “a hate crime assault” against the three Jewish women outside Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights. On Sunday, she was arrested for allegedly attacking a 35-year-old woman in Prospect Heights for no apparent reason, according to a WIN report. 

“Exasperated prosecutors asked Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Archana Rao to impose some kind of monitoring on Harris while she awaits trial,” said the Daily News.

“We’re here two days after the defendant was here on another case,” said an assistant district attorney in court after the second arrest, according to the newspaper, adding that “we do think the highest level of supervision available would be appropriate.”

Despite the request, the judge released Harris again without bail, according to the report. Harris was simply warned not to be arrested again while the matter is pending in court, said the Daily News.

World Israel News reported that critics are blaming the de Blasio administration’s new ‘bail reform’ legislation, which calls for freeing suspects that don’t cause physical harm (outside of sexual assaults).

Other incidents involved victims being hit in the face, the head and the back of the head, as well as at least one having a beverage thrown at them, said police.

Sliwa said, “We’re a visual deterrence in our red berets and our red satin jackets. Nobody’s going to commit an attack when we’re around.” If they do, he added, “We’ll physically restrain the persons responsible, make a citizen’s arrest and hold them until the police arrive.”

“These attacks are taking place, and the cops have not been proactive at all,” said Sliwa on Saturday. “It comes from City Hall and the mayor. He’s been just apathetic.”

The Guardian Angels first appeared on the New York City scene in the late 1970s when the violent crime rate in the city was literally spiraling out of control. They are a private, unarmed crime-prevention group.

Under the leadership of Brooklyn-born Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels ended up patrolling subways, streets and other high-risk public venues. Their conscientious attempts at significantly diminishing the crime rate in New York were quite successful but Sliwa always met with constant opposition from former Mayor Edward I Koch, who dismissed the group as ragtag vigilantes and wanted the NYPD to exclusively deal with criminal matters throughout the city.

Known for their red silk jackets that bear their Guardian Angels logo on the back and their bright red berets, the youthful cadre of devoted Guardian Angel volunteers were a ubiquitous site around the five boroughs of the city in the early 1980s. They served as both a comfort and reassurance to those New Yorkers who felt severely threatened by the soaring crime rate at the time and were becoming increasingly frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of the NYPD to do anything about it.

When the now infamous Crown Heights riots erupted in the summer of 1991, Sliwa and his Guardian Angels were called upon to keep the peace after yeshiva student Yankel Rosenbaum from Australia was brutally murdered by African American rioters. All of Crown Heights has morphed into a tinderbox of sorts as former Mayor David Dinkins did nothing to quell the riots and for several days the streets of Crown Heights were ablaze in violence. 

The Guardian Angels dealt with the likes of race baiter and virulent anti-Semite, Al Sharpton and stayed in the neighborhood for three months to ensure the safety of the Orthodox Jewish residents.

Fast forward to 2019. Sliwa told NBC News that the patrols would start on Sunday, first at noon in Crown Heights and later in the day also in Williamsburg and Borough Park, according to the JTA web site.

Sliwa told the media that local leaders of the Crown Heights based Chabad-Lubavitch movement asked for his group’s help by maintaining a presence in the area, due to the dramatic increase in anti-Semitic attacks. He also said that his group’s assistance was requested by the Satmar Chassidim of Williamsburg and the Bobov sect of Chassidus in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn.

“We’re a visual deterrence in our red berets and our red satin jackets,” he said. “Nobody’s going to commit an attack when we’re around.”

“These attacks are taking place, and the cops have not been proactive at all,” Sliwa added. “It comes from City Hall and the mayor. He’s been just apathetic.”