The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Monday night’s attack on a group of visibly Orthodox Jewish men in a New York City subway car after a video of the assault went viral online.

The clip, which has amassed hundreds of thousands of views, shows two men hurling antisemitic slurs at a group of Hasidic men in a crowded train car. After one of the Jewish victims confronts them, one of the assailants can be seen threatening to teach him “a lesson” before grabbing him by the neck and shouting, “I’ll kill you.”

Several straphangers can be heard in the video telling the attackers to “chill” and “calm down,” but none of the passengers intervened.

The group of Jewish men, who had been heading back to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from a Hanukkah event at Union Square, quickly exited the train at the next station and made their way to a nearby police precinct, one of the victims told the Orthodox Jewish news outlet COLlive.

“One stop before Crown Heights, we fled the train in fear. No one helped us. No one stood up or blocked the attackers. The son who attacked me gestured a gun to his head, and when I realized how dangerous it was, I quickly put my phone in my pocket. But the camera was still recording,” one of the Chabad men told COLlive. 

Another victim, 20-year-old Mendy Asraf, told the Post that the men started harassing them while they were transferring to the 3 train at the Franklin Avenue subway station, shouting antisemitic comments like “F**k the Jews.”

Mr. Asraf said he believes they were targeted because of their outwardly Jewish appearance. “We look like religious Jews,” he told the Post. “They recognized our appearance along with the menorahs.” 

The New York Police Department has confirmed that they are investigating the incident as a hate crime. On Tuesday morning, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon, condemned the incident on X as “horrific” and announced that the Civil Rights office would be launching an investigation. “Be safe out there … NYC is getting dangerous!” she added in a separate post. 

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Dannon, took a similar stand. “This is a deeply disturbing hate crime targeting young Chabad men on a train in New York, whose only act was sharing the light of Hanukkah,” he wrote on X. “Such acts of hatred must be unequivocally condemned, and those responsible must be held accountable.” 

Antisemitic incidents in New York City this year account for 56 percent of total hate crimes in the city — making Jews far more likely targets in hate crimes than any other group.

The assault comes as the Jewish community is still mourning after terrorists targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach in a shooting spree that killed 15 people and left dozens wounded.

“As the Jewish community worldwide — and @Chabad in particular — is reeling from the massacre in Bondi Beach, it’s painful that violent antisemitism persists in our home in NYC,” The Anti-Defamation League’s New York branch stated on X. “Jewish NYers must be able to safely ride the subways and walk the streets of NYC without being targets.”