The Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn was evacuated Thursday morning after it received a bomb threat, police said.
The NYPD got the call about the emailed threat at about 9:30 a.m. The museum, on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, was evacuated shortly after.
“NYPD is investigating the threat at the Jewish Children’s Museum. We take every threat seriously. New York City stands united against hate,” Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter.
The mayor was en route to the museum Thursday afternoon, his spokesman Eric Phillips wrote on Twitter.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo also denounced the threat and met with Devorah Halberstam, the founder of the museum, and other Jewish leaders.
“This is one of the cruelest ironies yet in this rash of anti-Semitism that we’ve been experiencing,” the governor said outside the building. “This is a museum that is a monument to tolerance.”
The museum was dedicated to Halberstam’s son, Ari, who was murdered in 1994.
The bomb threat comes amid multiple waves of threats to Jewish institutions across the country. Federal authorities have been investigating more than 100 hoax bomb threats in dozens of states over the past two months.
The most recent wave was March 7 when multiple Anti-Defamation League offices, including the Manhattan headquarters, along with several Jewish community centers, were targets of threats.
In New York City, there has been a 113 percent increase in hate crimes in 2017, compared to the same time frame in 2016, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said at a news conference on March 7.
With Jillian Jorgensen
