Fifty people showed up to Union Square on October 7 to read the names of the 1,200 Jews murdered in the Hamas massacre three years ago. Two hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators showed up to make sure nobody could hear them.
Four to one. That was the ratio. Mourners to protesters.
Among those 200-plus demonstrators, captured on video occupying chairs reserved for vigil participants and drowning out the reading of victims' names, was Mia Kurzer — a special education teacher at The Heritage School in East Harlem, as the New York Post reported Saturday. A public school teacher. Paid by New York City taxpayers. Entrusted with children.
The vigil, organized by Israelis for Peace, was scheduled for 7 p.m. Co-founder Tamar Glezerman had been explicit about the event's purpose: "This is not a political event. It is an event of grief, and is an event of honoring the dead." The demonstrators brought a sound system. They drowned out the speakers. They chanted "globalize the intifada" and, according to witnesses, "intifada revolution" and "death to the IDF." Some carried Hamas and Hezbollah flags.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the vigil stone-faced. The protesters turned on him too — "Zohran, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!" — and swarmed his car when he tried to leave after about an hour. Former Comptroller Brad Lander was also in attendance.
Jewish activist and educator Moshe Spern filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels on October 8, the day after the disruption. The complaint doesn't just cover what Kurzer did at Union Square. It alleges she showed up to school that same morning wearing a keffiyeh — on the anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust — in a building full of students.
Kurzer's history with anti-Israel activism isn't new. In a 2024 CNN interview, she described herself as Jewish and said she'd attended Hebrew school. She's been linked to campus activism at the University of Wisconsin. The complaint filed by Spern also references separate protests at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan — one in November 2025 and another in May 2026 — where demonstrators chanted "death to the IDF" outside a house of worship.
The Department of Education's Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity Management and the Special Commissioner on Schools Investigation now have the complaint. Another city teacher, Damien Neva, is already under investigation in a separate case. Kurzer declined to comment when contacted by the press.
Fifty people came to grieve. They couldn't even finish reading the names.
