Courtesy of JTA. Photo credit: Screenshot
Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani sits beside Comptroller Brad Lander at Kolot Chayeinu Rosh Hashanah services on Sept. 22, 2025
(JTA) — Rabbi Sam Kates-Goldman had a message for his congregants — and his city — on Rosh Hashanah when he acknowledged and offered gratitude to a prominent regular and a special guest in the pews.
Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a longtime Kolot Chayeinu congregant, and Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in the mayor’s race, were sitting in one of the first rows, each wearing a kippah and an obligatory face mask.
Kates-Goldman offered a welcome and expressed “gratitude” for the political pair’s presence at the service, which comes as some Jews in the city have balked at Mamdani’s candidacy over his stances on Israel.
“That is how we live in community together,” the rabbi said. “It is not just by pulling back, but even when we are afraid, it is by pulling together. That interdependence defines us, and I want you gentlemen to know that you are not doing this work alone. And you being here tells us that we are not doing it alone. We’re so glad to have you back. Thanks for being here.”
If the moment offered a high-water mark for Mamdani’s engagement with local Jewish communities, it was soon followed by a new low. The New York Times, reporting on Mamdani’s visit to Kolot, reported that he would next join Rep. Jerry Nadler at a “more mainstream congregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan” for Yom Kippur services.
That prompted speculation that Nadler was planning to bring Mamdani, whom he has endorsed, to his own synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun. But BJ, a nondenominational synagogue, rebuffed the idea on Thursday.
“Assemblymember Mamdani will not be joining services with our community,” B’nai Jeshurun told congregants by email on Thursday, shortly after sharing the same message as a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Yom Kippur is a holy day of deep spiritual significance, of introspection and prayer, not a time for political campaigning.”
Ahead of the primary, B’nai Jeshurun hosted a mayoral candidate forum where Mamdani made an appearance. Last month, when asked by JTA whether B’nai Jeshurun would be endorsing any of the mayoral candidates, the synagogue’s leader, Rabbi Roly Matalon, said its rabbis would “not in the upcoming NYC mayoral election nor in any future elections.”
With Mamdani’s campaign subject to accusations of antisemitism due to his hardline stances against Israel, including his recent vow that he would seek the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if elected, Mamdani’s appearance at a synagogue that embraces pro-Palestinian activism was not likely to quiet his detractors.
Still, it underscored the backing he has gotten from progressive Jews, including Lander, who cross-endorsed him in the mayoral primary and has since emerged as his closest Jewish surrogate.
Mamdani previously visited Kolot Chayeinu for Shabbat services in February and also reportedly visited the flagship LGBTQIA+ synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, according to a post on social media by Rabbi Abby Stein, a former part-time rabbi at Kolot Chayeinu.
During the Rosh Hashanah service, ahead of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead, Kates-Goldman acknowledged his grief at the killings of “tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The rabbi also decried the “weaponization of antisemitism to push Islamophobia” in an apparent reference to some of Mamdani’s opponents.
