“I’m not scared. I’m never scared,” the shop owner, Hila Ashkenazi, told JNS. “I was in the Israeli army, teaching self-defense. They should be scared of me.”
Israeli and American flags waved outside Bagels & Co., a kosher eatery in Queens, N.Y., on Thursday afternoon, as hundreds of community members packed both the sidewalk and dining hall of the bagel shop, which had been attacked days earlier in what the community calls an antisemitic attack.
Many of those who assembled were teens from nearby Orthodox high schools, who descended on Bagels & Co. to buy their lunch there.
A man wearing Muslim garb attacked the kosher bagel shop, in the Fresh Meadows neighborhood of Queens, over the recent Shavuot holiday. The man kicked over planters outside the store and cracked one of the store windows.
Daniel Rosen, who founded the nonprofit Impact after Oct. 7, organized the “foodies united” rally with Young Israel of Jamaica Estates, Young Israel Holliswood, Chazaq, Great Kosher Restaurant Foodies, Yeshiva University High School for Girls and Emet Outreach.