YWN EDITORIAL: Andrew Cuomo’s Yom Kippur Apology To Orthodox Jews Ends With “I’d Do It Again”

FILE - Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo testifies before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee's hearing on the Coronavirus Pandemic, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

Shortly before Yom Kippur, former Governor and current Mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo released a video statement to the frum media in which he purported to apologize for his discriminatory treatment of our shul’s and baatei midrashim during and after Sukkos 2020. For those who may have forgotten, Cuomo announced on chol hamoed Sukkos 2020 that Shuls and other houses of worship in Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens would be limited to 10 or 25 person attendance.

While Cuomo’s “apology” was obviously driven by his desperate desire to remain relevant in a mayoral election that he trails badly, there were at least some who were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Cuomo’s repentance didn’t last long. On Friday he gave another interview, this time to the non-Jewish media, in which he took back the apology and said that he didn’t do anything wrong in 2020 and would do it all over again.

Cuomo told the reporter that his “apology” was “I’m sorry you felt that way,” explaining that “they believed that they were closed down because they were Orthodox. That was not the case . .. they thought that there was some connection that they happened to be Othodox Jewish communities. That was totally not true.”

The interview concluded with this: Cuomo was asked, “So you wouldn’t have changed anything?” He responded, “no.”

Some apology. What he is sorry about is that paranoid Orthodox Jews got it all wrong.

Cuomo has gone from disrespecting and insulting our religion to disrespecting and insulting our intelligence.

YWN believes it is important to correct the record and remind those who have forgotten what Andrew Cuomo broadcast to the world about the Orthodox community in October 2020. As the United States Supreme Court found when it struck down Cuomo’s rules because they discriminated against our religion, Cuomo’s “statements made in connection with the challenged rules can be viewed as targeting the ‘ultra-Orthodox [Jewish] community.’”

What were those statements?

He began by singling out the “ultra-Orthodox community” and “religious institutions” as causing the recent COVID-19 “problem” and threatened to “close the religious institutions down if you do not agree to enforce the rules.”

Shortly thereafter, he said that “we have a couple of unique clusters, frankly, which are more religious organizations, and that’s what we’re targeting,” and he stressed that the targeted cluster “is predominately an ultra-Orthodox cluster.” Cuomo then announced on national television that the spread was “because of their religious practices.”

To leave no doubt about what he was doing, Cuomo emphasized that “the micro-cluster we’re focusing on is the ultra-Orthodox communities” and that it is necessary to impose stringent restrictions on “these ultra Orthodox communities, who are also very politically powerful.” During one of his nationally televised press conferences, he held up a picture of a frum funeral to demonstrate how unsafe the Orthodox community was. The only problem was that it was a twenty year old picture.

To repeat: during the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo publicly blamed Orthodox Jewish communities and practices for the spread of COVID. And to top it all off, while he was targeting us for discriminatory treatment he publicly repeated the old trope about our political power.

And he now proudly says he wouldn’t change a thing.

We should take him at his word that he would do it all over again if he believed that it was politically advantageous for him.

We are well aware of the stakes in the upcoming mayoral election, as well as of the many good reasons for the deep antipathy to Zohran Mamdani.

YWN does not endorse candidates for political office and would not presume to tell anyone whether they should vote for Curtis Sliwa, Andrew Cuomo or anyone else.

But our community’s political effectiveness is not enhanced when we play dumb or allow ourselves to be made fools of the way Cuomo did in the space of 48 hours last week.

Vote for whomever you feel you must. But do it with your eyes wide open and your nose tightly shut.

YWN Editorial Board

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