[VIDEO & PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president and a likely candidate for mayor, held a press conference on Tuesday with a group of Jewish leaders to denounce what he said was a rash of anti-Semitic episodes in the city.

Standing on the edge of Bryant Park in Midtown, across the Avenue of the Americas from a row of stores where swastikas were discovered scrawled on the storefronts on Sunday, Mr. Stringer described what he said was �a disturbing trend� of anti-Semitic acts in recent months.

In November, someone set three cars on fire and scrawled swastikas on park benches in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn. Days later, in the same neighborhood, a vandal altered a sign at the Avenue J stop on the Q train to read �Avenue Jew.�

�We are asking New Yorkers for help in tracking down the people who are spewing this hate, and we�re also telling the N.Y.P.D.�s hate crime unit that we are involved, we are committed,� Mr. Stringer said.

Mr. Stringer, who is one of only two Jews among the field of prospective 2013 mayoral candidates � the other is the newspaper publisher Tom Allon � was joined by several Jewish community leader.

Mr. Stringer praised the Police Department�s hate crimes unit, while asking the police to release data on the number of hate crimes reported in the city in 2011, because, he said, �we need to analyze more fully where this trend is going.�

Asked why these particular stores had been targeted for vandalism, Mr. Stringer said he did not know. Nor did he have a broader theory about what was fueling the anti-Semitic acts. But he was emphatic that such acts should not be tolerated.

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