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Businesses along the main street, Palestine Way, are adorned with signs in Arabic, hawking halal foods and traditional Muslim clothing. Palestinian flags line the streets, and one flies proudly over city hall.

In schools lunchrooms, children consume halal foods — except on Islamic holidays, when schools are closed. Palestinians proudly serve as members of city council, police officers, and judges. Islamic religious celebrations and pro-Palestinian rallies are held on city property, sponsored by elected officials.

Above all, the broadcast of the adhan, the call of the muezzin to Muslim prayer, echoes through the streets and alleys.

Where are we? Ramallah? Gaza City? Beirut?

Close. It’s Paterson, New Jersey.

With a burgeoning Muslim and Palestinian population, Paterson is celebrating its newest subculture. But when Mayor Andre Sayegh declares it the “Palestinian capital of the United States,” alarm bells began to ring.

Has the city finally gone too far? How has it affected the nearby large Jewish communities of Passaic, Clifton, and Teaneck, and the Yeshiva Gedolah of Paterson? Have Paterson’s elected officials crossed the amorphous line between cultural celebration and political rhetoric? Between free speech and anti-Semitism?

Ramallah’s Sister City

Paterson has 150,000 residents, about 20% of whom are Muslim, making it home to the second-largest Muslim population in the United States after Houston. Many of these are Palestinian immigrants or Americans of Palestinian descent, which prompted the city’s leaders to begin supporting Palestinian causes years ago. In early 2023, Mayor Andre Sayegh signed a sister-city agreement with officials from Ramallah, cementing a relationship that included economic benefits and cultural exchanges.

Paterson’s nine-seat city council boasts three Muslim members: Shahin Khalique, MD Forid Uddin, and Ibrahim Omar. Deputy Mayor Raed Odeah is a practicing Muslim, and Mayor Sayegh has declared himself an Arab-American, although he is a US-born Catholic, son of a Syrian mother and Lebanese father. Assemblyman Alaa Abdelaziz, a Palestinian-American who formerly served on the city council, represents the city in New Jersey’s 35th Legislative District.

The city government highlights Palestinian officials like police officer Serene Tamey, and Chief Judge Abdulmageid Abdelhadi, the first Palestinian-American to hold that position in a US city.

In 2022, south Paterson was named “Little Palestine,” and on “Nakba Day,” then-councilman Abdelaziz was successful in his campaign to rename the main street Palestine Way.

A Palestinian Capital

When the city sponsored a ceremony marking the beginning of Ramadan in late February, Mayor Andre Sayegh made a surprising declaration.

“Paterson is the capital of Palestine in the United States of America,” he said. “Paterson is the fourth-holiest city in the Muslim world — Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, and then… Paterson, New Jersey!”

Sayegh then trumpeted his administration’s adoption of Islamic policies and rules, including school closures for Islamic holidays, serving halal food at public schools, and the use of city hall for Muslim religious events.

“Paterson embraces and appreciates Islam so much so that we are one of the few cities in the country where children are afforded a day off for both Eid holidays, where children in schools can have halal food in their cafeterias, where the adhan, the call to prayer, can be heard in the city,” Mayor Sayegh enthused. “And I also would like to state that since taking office, we opened up the doors of city hall for the first time in Paterson’s history to have a community iftar to break-fast in Paterson.”

The Company You Keep

The city’s devotion to Palestinian culture is ultimately reflective of nothing more than immigration trends, and the decisions of elected officials to court a large new voting bloc. But secrets often lie behind a public official’s associations.

Mayor Sayegh’s Ramadan event was cosponsored by several local Islamic organizations, and some have checkered score sheets.

One sponsor, the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC), is a mosque that has extensively featured radical ideas and supported fundraising for Hamas-linked organizations. One of its imams, Mohamed Hassaballa, has called for Muslims to “overtake disbelievers.” The mosque has hosted fundraisers for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its director of mosque engagement, Ayman Aishat.

CAIR leaders portrayed the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, as a legitimate act, declaring, “The people of Gaza only decided to break the walls of the concentration camp on October 7.” Aishat defended terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, who was sentenced to 86 years in prison for attempted attacks against Americans; and has himself been denied US citizenship due to his ties to an Islamist charity that funds Hamas. Aishat has made such provocative statements as, “Herzl plotted to remove the Quran from Muslims’ hearts, to make it easier to control them and destroy their countries.”

Another sponsor of the Paterson Ramadan event was the Palestinian American Community Center (PACC), a political entity pushing a radical pro-Hamas agenda. Its leader, Rania Mustafa, was even given the podium at the ceremony. Mustafa and PACC actively lobby for pro-Palestinian policies, organize radical demonstrations, and push extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activism, including the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.

Speaking at the city-run event, Mustafa turned it from a religious observance to a political rally, pushing a 17-page “advocacy guide” defining Ramadan as an opportunity to campaign against Israel, using methods ranging from BDS to liking “Free Palestine” social media accounts, using pro-Hamas hashtags, and calling elected officials to criticize Israel.

The Ramadan kickoff was by no means the first time Sayegh’s administration has used government space to promote Islamic events. It annually hosts Muslim Heritage Month at city hall; and sponsors Palestine Week, during which Palestinian flags are raised at city hall and other government buildings and displayed throughout the city.

Palestine Week includes city-sponsored rallies at which crowds chant anti-Israel, pro-Hamas slogans, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and others calling for the destruction of Israel.

“We proudly raise the Palestinian flag, have renamed Main Street to Palestine Way, and celebrate Palestine Day on Palestine Way,” Sayegh said on June 9, Palestine Day. “I am proud to have appointed the first Palestinian-American to a cabinet position and recently appointed the first Palestinian-American police captain in Paterson. We come together… united as Palestinians.”

PACC board president Diab Mustafa was invited to speak at that event as well, and thanked the city council, saying, “Your resolution for a ceasefire means a lot to us. Palestinians are proud to call Paterson home.” He referred to a resolution brought before the Paterson City Council as early as October 25, 2023 — less than three weeks after Hamas committed the massacre — calling for “peace and justice for Palestinians” in the “occupied territories.”

Fun until Someone Gets Hurt

While Paterson today is largely devoid of identifiable Jewish life, it is a stone’s throw from the robust communities of Teaneck, Passaic, and Clifton; and the Palestinian residents of the city have made it their business to terrorize their Jewish neighbors as much as legally possible.

Paterson was once home to a community of 40,000 people, but the ancient shuls now stand empty. The remaining icon of Judaism is Yeshiva Gedolah of Paterson, which opened there specifically because it was isolated from the “kosher” distractions of the larger Jewish communities, while close enough to benefit from their qualities and infrastructure. There is also an old-timers’ minyan that meets twice a month, although it needs to import a tzenter from Fair Lawn — and sometimes a ninth man, too.

In the aftermath of October 7, pro-Hamas rallies burst from the Palestinian centers of Paterson, with some turning contentious. Local police offered to post guards outside the doors of the yeshivah, but the rosh yeshivah, Rav Elya Chaim Swerdloff, refused.

“Torah magna u’matzla,” he explained to the bochurim. “Torah protects and saves. There is no need for protection for a yeshivah, which learns Torah.”

Indeed, the yeshivah has not experienced any security incidents.

Since October 7, Palestinian activists have focused much of their energies on hounding residents of Teaneck and other towns. In December 2023, a caravan of nearly 200 cars drove from Paterson to Teaneck to protest the war in Gaza. Just last week, a car rally and in-person protesters harassed a Nefesh b’Nefesh event at the Glenpointe Marriott Hotel in Teaneck.

“The Zionist element of Teaneck’s population continues to parade itself as an essential arm of the criminal Israeli occupation before the entire world,” organizers wrote to supporters. “It arrogantly boasts responsibility for its role in maintaining a violent, genocidal apartheid state, which has subjected Palestinians to decades of needless suffering.”

Numerous protests have been held in front of Teaneck shuls, including one at a Zaka event at Congregation Bnai Yeshurun last April, and at Keter Torah. Several of these events ended with arrests for assault or bias intimidation. An Israel real estate investment fair held this week was forced to withhold information regarding its location to registrants, in an attempt to minimize protest and disruption.

As Paterson’s large Palestinian population adopts a more aggressive posture toward the local Jewish community, it becomes incumbent on state officials to keep that belligerent behavior in check, and ensure that the familiar, unfortunate scenario playing out in European Jewish communities is not allowed to take root here.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1054)