The kosher market on Martin Luther King Drive
10 December 2019JC Kosher Supermarket, Martin Luther King Drive, Greenville, Hudson County, NJ
Two attackers killed a Jersey City detective, then drove to a kosher supermarket serving the city's small Hasidic community and killed three people inside. New Jersey's attorney general called it domestic terrorism driven by antisemitism.
Note: Describes a shooting in which four people were killed.
A Hasidic community had been settling in the Greenville section of Jersey City for several years, priced out of Brooklyn, and had opened the institutions that follow - a school, a synagogue, and the JC Kosher Supermarket on Martin Luther King Drive. Their arrival had produced friction with longtime Black residents over housing and over the aggressive buying tactics of some outside realtors, and some of that friction had been loudly antisemitic.
On 10 December 2019 David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, shot and killed Detective Joseph Seals of the Jersey City Police Department at Bayview Cemetery. They drove a stolen U-Haul van to the supermarket, parked directly outside and went in shooting. Three people in the store were killed: Leah Mindel Ferencz, who owned it with her husband; Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student who had come in to shop; and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez Barzola, an Ecuadorian immigrant who worked there. A gun battle with police followed and both attackers were killed inside the store.
Investigators found writings and social media postings that made the motive plain, along with a pipe bomb in the van. The attackers had been drawn to the fringe of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, a set of beliefs whose extreme edge holds that Jews are impostors occupying an identity that rightly belongs to Black Americans. New Jersey's attorney general said the killings were fuelled by hatred of Jews and of law enforcement and were an act of domestic terrorism.
It matters for this map that the supermarket was a target chosen because of who shopped there, and that one of the people killed in it was a Latino employee. The state's bias-incident figures for that year recorded 345 anti-Jewish incidents across New Jersey, more than for any other religious group.
Four killed: a police detective at a cemetery, and three people inside the supermarket. Both attackers died in the gun battle.
Sources
- Attorney General Grewal and Jersey City Officials Provide Update on Investigation into December 10 ShootingsOffice of the Attorney General, State of New Jersey (2019)nj.govBacks the sequence of the attack, the attackers' names and ages, the victims, the targeting of the kosher supermarket, and the state's conclusion that the killings were fuelled by antisemitism.
- 2019 Bias Incident ReportDivision on Civil Rights, State of New Jersey (2020)nj.govBacks the figure of 345 reported anti-Jewish bias incidents in New Jersey in 2019, the highest of any religious group.