The seventh night of Hanukkah in Monsey

Rockland County holds one of the largest Hasidic and Orthodox populations in the United States, concentrated in Monsey and the surrounding town of Ramapo. The autumn of 2019 had brought a run of attacks on visibly Orthodox Jews across the New York area - people punched in the street in Brooklyn, a synagogue window broken, a man beaten walking to prayers - and the Jersey City supermarket shooting had happened eighteen days earlier.

On the night of 28 December 2019, the seventh night of Hanukkah, dozens of people were gathered at the Forshay Road home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, next door to his synagogue. A man came in with his face covered by a scarf and an eighteen-inch machete, and slashed at the people in the room. Five were wounded before he fled. Someone photographed his car as it left.

Josef Neumann, 72, a father of seven, was struck in the head. He did not regain consciousness and died three months later.

Grafton Thomas was arrested in Harlem the same night and charged with federal hate crimes - five counts of causing bodily injury because of the victims' religion and five of obstructing the free exercise of religion in an attempt to kill - and with murder and attempted murder by Rockland County. Journals recovered from his house contained references to Hitler and to Nazi culture and questioned why people mourned Jews. He has since been found repeatedly to be mentally incapacitated and unfit to stand trial, and has been held in a secure psychiatric facility; both the state and federal prosecutions remain suspended. No court has tried the case.