While walking to shul with his young son on Shabbos morning, Chabad spokesman Rabbi Motti Seligson found himself caught in the middle of a chaotic protest on the Upper East Side, where he was followed and harassed by an antisemitic agitator.

Seligson was walking down York Ave in Manhattan’s Upper East Side wearing his tallis when he encountered a melee near Gracie Mansion, the official residence of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. A far-right group had brought a roasted pig to the mayor’s residence as a provocation, and they were met by a crowd of over a hundred counter-protesters. Many in the crowd were wearing pro-Hamas shirts and carrying signs celebrating the murder of Jews.

The situation at Gracie Mansion was widely reported to be highly volatile. Reports indicate that counter-protesters threw a homemade device packed with nuts, bolts, and fuses – currently under investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force – leading to multiple arrests.

“I pushed through with some loud ‘excuse me’ and we were fine, thank G-d,” Seligson wrote in a thread posted online after Shabbos.

However, the situation quickly escalated for Seligson and his son. An individual from the mob struck up a conversation with him, and it immediately became clear the man was a rabid Jew-hater.

When Seligson asked the man to stop walking with them, he refused. Even a threat to call the police – who were heavily deployed in the area to protect the mayor’s residence – failed to deter the harasser.

“So I started screaming at him to back off,” Seligson recounted. “It rattled him, and he finally stopped following us.”

Boruch Hashem, Seligson noted that his young son didn’t seem visibly bothered by the ordeal, but he raised a painful question: “Why is it that the vast majority of New Yorkers need to be held hostage by the crazies?”

The most glaring element of the Shabbos morning encounter, however, was the sheer hypocrisy regarding protest buffer zones. To protect the mayor, the NYPD rapidly set up barricades and a massive 200-foot safety perimeter to separate the groups.

This massive, police-enforced buffer zone is exactly what Jewish askonim have been begging the city to implement outside shuls and schools, and exactly what the Mamdani administration has resisted.

“This all amidst claims 50′ is too far to keep haters [and] demonstrators from houses of worship,” Seligson pointed out, noting the double standard. “Why can’t cities be for the vast majority who are good people?”

Already on his very first day in office, Mayor Mamdani completely abolished an executive order put in place by former Mayor Eric Adams that would have mandated protective buffer zones around shuls and yeshivos.

Currently, a revised City Council bill (Intro 0001-2026) is pending. All the bill asks for is that the NYPD create a flexible, case-by-case response plan using barricades when there is a credible risk of intimidation at a house of worship. Yet Mayor Mamdani has refused to commit to signing the bill, claiming he is still reviewing its “legality,” while his progressive political allies protest the measure outside City Hall.

The city’s hesitance comes just a short time after a car rammed into 770 Eastern Parkway just a few weeks ago. The attack occurred despite early warnings to the new Mamdani administration requesting the installation of bollards and physical barriers at high-risk Jewish sites.

While the current administration argues that establishing flexible perimeters outside a shul might violate “free speech,” the city clearly had no problem deploying those exact tactics to protect the mayor’s home.