Gaza war protesters block Brooklyn Bridge

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — Dozens of protesters of the Jewish faith were arrested on Thursday after they chained their arms together and blocked the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge at Tillary Street, to protest the war in Gaza on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

The protest snarled traffic over the bridge during the evening rush hour.

The demonstrators were members of Rabbis for Ceasefire and other Jewish groups. Rabbis for Ceasefire is made up of rabbis, rabbinical students, cantors and related clergy, and members believe that all life is sacred, including Palestinian lives.

The group gathered first at Brooklyn Borough Hall mid-afternoon for a peaceful Yizkor prayer service and speeches. “It’s been two years since Hamas attacked Israel, and two years since Israel began vengeful, brutal attacks on Gaza,” Rabbi Ellen Lippman said. 

Numerous Brooklyn elected officials joined the religious, including Comptroller Brad Lander; Public Advocate Jumaane Williams; Councilmembers Shahana Hanif, Alexa Avilés, Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse and Lincoln Restler; state Sens. Kristin Gonzalez, Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport; and state Assemblymembers Emily Gallagher, Harvey Epstein and Phara Souffrant Forrest. 

The crowd held a moment of silence on the plaza steps, and participated in a ritual shredding of cloth, which symbolizes the rending of garments in grief. 

Then the religious members, wearing white, formed a procession and marched to Tillary Street. At the entrance to the bridge, several locked their arms together inside long tubes — a technique used by protesters to make it more difficult for police to separate them — and sat in the roadway blocking the entrance to the bridge, while others sat next to them in solidarity. Members of the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group began making arrests, while the crowd sang songs in Hebrew and cheered. Those arrested lined up, hands zip-tied, to board a white police bus.

“We are here on the holiest Jewish day of the year,” Rabbi Elliott Kukla, a grief chaplain from Oakland, California, told the Brooklyn Eagle. “We brought our services out onto the street. This is when Jews traditionally gather for a service of memory, so we are here to share our grief for every single person who has been killed in the last two years of atrocity in Palestine. We began with a service at Borough Hall, and then we brought our street processional here to protest.”