This is for real - shades of Nazi Germany boycotts of Jewish businesses:
“This hotel belongs to a Jewish terror family and needs to be closed in one way or another. No mercy!!! 💣”
We are facing yet another cycle of the world’s favorite game called ‘get the Jew’. Whether it is an imposed distraction set in place by the unified front of the globalist and Islamist agendas, or a cognitive dissonance to the stealth campaign against Western Culture raging in the EU Parliament, and the encroaching Islamification of Europe’s cities, towns and yes, by now even their hamlets, the results are the same.
We as Jews are encircled and targeted for destruction.
Hamas-follower attempts to besiege our family business, The Historic Blue Moon Hotel, do not augur well for New York City, the United States and definitely not for its greater Jewish community. If we’ve learned one thing from our history, it is that Jewish continuity requires unified vocality and assertive activism to keep antisemitic monsters at bay, and as a means to wake up indifferent, slumbering and ghettoized timid Jews. Allowing enemy combatants and uncommitted Jews to navigate the diaspora will only bring all of us into a greater position of danger.
No Rest for the Weary
The real life story of the Blue Moon Hotel : Since July 21st, there has been no respite from menacing death threats, on my cell at work and at our home in the middle of the night. The song plays on venomous attacks by email, phone calls, social media and review forums which reek from keyboard-raging Islamist supporters with projections and insinuations of infanticide pouring in from around the globe. (click the link above for details).
Yelp Review from Amsterdam
The glut of obviously staged malicious online reviews affect our ratings and algorithm and although at times they have been disabled by regulating bots, this relieves some of the malignment sting but further marginalizes our online presence. Here is one:
“However, no matter what I tried, I could not get a good night's sleep here. I'm used to sleeping in an urban environment, but as soon as I would start drifting off, I could hear the blood curdling screams of children, thousands and thousands of children screaming in fear and pain. If I did manage to sleep, I had nightmares with themes of treachery, mendacity, murder, and theft.”
Incoming emails are a dumping ground for ominous threats and repetitive nasty expletives:
Let’s close this Jewish concern, we want to know when you are around, Were coming to get you, when is your son coming back, I want to give him a hug, You live at xxxx, we know where you are. &$%#Israel. @#$king Nazi genocidal state. @#$% israel @#$% israel.
Free Palestine from the river to the sea. Cucarachas Nazis. Name @#$%israel email@#$%[email protected] ,
@#$%israel. From the river to the sea. @#$%Israel. Free Palestine. Free Palestine from the river to the sea. Nasty cucarachas nazis. Nazis 2.0.
From Twitter
-They have an employee committing war crimes and genocide representing their hotel. BDS would be happy to add them to the list.
-He should never come back if he comes than we have a Party. 🎉🎇🎆
-This hotel belongs to a Jewish terror family and needs to be closed in one way or another. No mercy!!! 💣
On August 25, Hamas-inspired cheerleaders returned for an up close and personal visit.
The Fashion Institute of Technology’s branch of Students for Justice in Palestine paid us a visit at the Historic Blue Moon Hotel. The fashionista kaffiyeh trending branch of SJP staged a makeshift runway, sporting laptops displaying slideshows as they posed with contempt handing out flyers and indiscriminately chiming in chants of “Boycott Zion Nazi Blue Moon Hotel,” and other not-so-catchy phrases. They hoped to discourage visitors from attending our Kosher Sweet Dreams Café and restaurant, they took a second position opposite the hotel in front of the Tenement Museum to rant about our son’s IDF service and malign the hotel.
Luigi, a Christian who on occasion volunteers at the hotel, was out front cleaning up the exterior; he was already disgusted by the October 7th massacre and well aware of the Palestinian Arab blame game. Luigi gave them hell about the psychotic and depraved and murderous acts committed by the Gazan Arabs. He did not allow them to impinge on his space as he performed a water dance with a garden hose cleaning the area directly in front of the hotel.
Soon thereafter, we received support from Congressional Challenger Mike Zumbluskas and his staff. Mike arrived with a sincere group of concerned citizens waving a six-foot American flag. He spoke intelligently and with reason to an ugly and unprincipled band hell bent on defending the indefensible. Mike is a community activist who should be noted for challenging Congressman Jerry Nadler, a Jewish politician who signed Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action meant to slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions via appeasement (however, as appeasement goes it was a $150B donation which in actuality served to prop up the Mullahs’ crumbling regime, subsidize Hezbollah, Hamas and made the long-awaited breakout time on Iran’s highly coveted Atomic Bomb ambition many steps closer to reality).
The fashionista branch of SJP were not interested in our Last Jewish Tenement tour nor the in the art, history and not the slightest bit curious about National Geographic choice of our hotel as one of 150 in the Western Hemisphere to check into. They were fixated on targeting Bram Settenbrino.
September 7th
In Germany National Socialists wore brown, in Italy end elsewhere Black was the predominant color, apparently in NYC pink is the new black. Groups of pink-clad men are gathering on the Lower East Side to clandestinely shield the parqueting of posters with the false headline ‘Bram Settenbrino from the Blue Moon Hotel detonated a mosque’, making sure not to miss Grand and Orchard the corner of our location.
Make no mistake; a false message of a mosque detonation is a malicious invitation with the express purpose to induct the first willing and able raving mad Islamist to do our family and business harm.
A Mosque or a Satanic Temple?
Hamasniks want to gain adherents by duping the public to believe that a holy site is a building which houses a death cult urging congregants to sacrifice their children to Moloch, gathers offerings of weapons, builds altars of rocket pads and obscures a nerve center entrance to a subterranean labyrinthine under world with the intention to abduct Jews, hold them in captivity and subject them to the vilest indignities only a depraved monstrous mind could conjure up.
However, the world over, a holy place is an assembly to pray communally, strengthen moral convictions, and serve G-d by serving the needy and poor.
In Gaza there is a paradoxical reversal of religious and cultural norms where hospitals, schools and houses of worship double as hubs of warfare. What would be condemned as diabolical use of cherished institutions elsewhere is fair and praised in the war against the Jews.
Although Hamas/Islamist practices of worshiping death make a cynical mockery of universal spiritual values they are not called out in the media for the unconscionable dept of depravity they practice in the name of their god.
Israel is conducting a war that it did not start and yet is paramount to Western survival and is of great consequence to the future of the civilized world.
That is why Jews whose culture sanctifies life, who live in a world devoted to family that transmits genuine values to of next generations, are compelled to send their children off to war. Should they be blessed to return home whole they have still put their most developmental education and career years on hold; the time lost is irretrievable but the lessons of honor, loyalty , respect and responsibility are invaluable and cannot be taught in any institution of higher learning.
Our son Bram, the subject of the SJP’s hysteria, through his sacrifice and through risking his life for a just cause, has reached a level of maturity and understanding of the world few of his Western contemporaries will ever achieve. In five years, he gained genuine qualities and credentials, chosen in 2023 as soldier of the year by his combat engineering unit and in 2024 selected to have Seder with Israel's Prime Minister. He is held in great esteem by his commanders and religious leaders.
Mike Ben Yaakov, Commander of the IDU:
“Bram Settenbrino made Aliyah from the states and joined the Israel Dog Unit. During his tour of duty, he found three missing people and helped save many lives. He then moved on to join The IDF Engineer Corps. And has been fighting deep in Gaza for the past two months, since the horrific Simchat Torah Massacre.”
Achiya, Bram’s Platoon Commander: “Bram fought with us in Gaza and made a really good effort, was with us in maneuvers and raids, fought fiercely.”
MK Dov Lipman: “Bram left New York to enlist in the IDF as a lone soldier. Yes, he entered Gaza to fight Hamas on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people.”
A Breath of Fresh Air
On August 30th, a week prior to the poster plaquette campaign, Israel’s new Consul-General Ofir visited to show support for our very Jewish high-profile concern.
On that day, we closed Sweet Dreams Café and restaurant to limit traffic. The Consul General arrived with his staff at 11am; he was warm, friendly, and genuinely interested in our project, and after our last Jewish Tenement tour, which covers the history of the Jewish Lower East Side, he studied the fourteen collages of the lives loved and lost at 100 Orchard Street. He stopped briefly to call his wife and daughter to join us and share the experience.
The day felt as if we were spending quality time with our extended family. At the next stop we checked out our Yiddish theater floor and explored a suite dedicated to the Yiddishe Diva Molly Picon. We sat out on the broad wide balcony where every building of note is visible. A bird’s eye view of Orchard street made it easy to imagine the 2 million Jews who traversed the Lower East Side, who made astonishing contributions to American life.
Across the way, the replacement building for the Twin Towers could be seen. Ofir acknowledged September 11th as being the American equivalent to October 7th, both being a result of radical Islam, and lamented about the antisemitism in New York City, sharing his grandmother’s experience in Europe in the ’30s as a parallel for the real-time Jew hatred we are seeing around the world - and experiencing in New York City.
After sharing a glass of wine on the terrace I personally prepared luncheon fit for the Consul General: handmade mozzarella, selected wines, risotto and salmon, Bolognese with rigatoni and cream pesto with fresh tuna and pignoli and baked goods, and my wife Shaina’s famed Lemon Tiramisu - which I compare to the status of Vienna’s coveted Sachertorte. (Does that whet your appetite?)
I took the opportunity to speak frankly about our arduous journey and challenges in maintaining our hub of Jewish life and culture on the Lower East Side. The boycott comes at a tenuous time since we are still recuperating from the economic death throes of an 18-month pandemic closure which was exacerbated by one-size-fits-all programs that excluded us from PPP, grants or any helpful program offered. City, state, and federal agencies talk a big game of community arts, family business and economic growth. However, there is a bureaucratic indifference that contributes to the diminishment of those who drive the economy and bring benefit to their community.
We told him how despite our small size we’ve provided multiple goodwill initiatives in culinary and rehabilitative initiatives for challenged members of society, housed the former Eldridge Street Congregation for 7.5 years all gratis and created a Kosher café and restaurant offering Klezmer and classical music for an iconic Jewish community bereft of a kosher eatery for 5 years.
“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” John D. Rockefeller
The right thing to do was preserve a chunk of NYC history in a stately building of an architect of note, Julius Boekel, where former Jewish refugees, tenants and merchants are honored by 14 collages of their personal effects curated in a museum-like hotel which received a huge media triumph, and which stimulated a resurgence south of Delancy and buttressed the historical presence of the Tenement Museum.
Ofir Akunis, his wife, and his staff members were moved by their experience of our stately hotel standing in the cradle of New York Jewish Life, a first home for over 2 million Jews, refugees fleeing pogroms, who struggled a life of drudgery in a sink or swim American Depression and left their indelible mark on America.
Ofir and his staff also recognized and showed concern for our contemporary struggle with SJP whose aspiration is to bury the only family-run Jewish hotel and restaurant left on the Lower East Side. The Consul General is firm in his conviction that it is imperative for all of us to stand together, speak up and support one another, saying. “I’m calling on New Yorkers: wake up before it will be too late!”
“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.”Charlie Chaplin
At the time of our most urgent need it has been kindness and unusual miracles that have sustained our family and enterprise. Remarkably it took a man of immense responsibilities and concerns like Ofir Akunis to not just to call, but spend entire day of support with us, ironically, as of now, we cannot get a cameo appearance from any of the Jewish congressmen, senators or even the Jewish Caucus of NYC Council to show up, let alone help our beleaguered family business, a poster child for preservation, arts, and Jewish cultural life.
Seeing support from volunteers during the pandemic, and friends and family reaching out to help, seeing people who walk the walk strengthens our convictions and gives us hope that we are not fighting our battles in vain. The image of Mike Zumbluskas with the American flag, the young Rabbi from Nevada walking smack through a nasty and ugly crowd with his wife and three small young boys to eat at our restaurant, supportive emails and people who want to donate time and money to help us, all give us the motivation to continue our mission to secure our building and play our part in securing America's freedom.