New York City Mayor Eric Adams has admitted to Jewish reporters that he makes frequent visits to the graves of leading rebbes who are buried in his city, namely the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Ribnitzer Rebbe, to whom he feels very connected and derives great inspiration.
Both those rabbis were special individuals,” the mayor said, the COLlive website reported. “In my faith it says ‘absent from the body is present in the spirit,’ and you know energy could never die, it could only be transformed – and so if that logic is correct, then their energy is still among us and quantum physics states that in order to acknowledge something, see something, you have to acknowledge the existence of it."
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams vistis the Western Wall in Jerusalem
(Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
The New York mayor added that "I acknowledge the existence of both of their energies and when I go through difficult times, I found that I visit their grave sites and the energy materializes, materializes things that I look for. And when I was running for office, and Andrew Yang was measuring for the drapes because he thought he was going to be the mayor. Devorah Halberstam told me that she had a dream that the Grand Rebbe wanted me to visit his site. And I did just that. And as you know, today I am Mayor Adams and not Yang.”
The mayor also makes a point to visit the gravesite of Ari Halberstam, son of Devorah Halberstam, who was murdered in an attack in 1994 by a Lebanese terrorist on the Brooklyn Bridge, while accompanying the Lubavitcher Rebbe along with other young Chabad members and is buried near the Rebbe.
Since then, Devorah Halberstam has been training law enforcement officers around the world and was appointed the New York Police Department's Honorary Commissioner of Community Safety.
The mayor met last week with reporters from Jewish news outlets. He discussed various issues of concern to the Jewish community and explained why he continues to visit the Rebbe's grave, known as the Ohel.
During the meeting, the mayor addressed the pro-Palestinian protests that have been taking place in New York for the past year.
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"When you do an analysis of our response, there’s a real balance to allow peaceful protests and violent protests,” the mayor said. “And our legal team over at the New York City Police Department, the corp counsel, they make sure we don’t cross that line. And although there are many days we want to, when I hear people say, you know, death to America, when I hear people [are] wearing Hamas T-shirts, when I hear people spewing out hateful tongues, trust me, we wanna go in and just lock them up from doing that, but the law doesn’t allow us to do that."
"The NYPD made arrests whenever someone broke the law in the form of antisemitism, from swastikas to assaults to harassment," the mayor said.
Deputy Mayor Fabien Levy noted that the mayor often visits the graves of the rebbes and Ari Halberstam privately, without his people knowing about it, just for the purpose of prayer.