A Jewish organization in Brooklyn received a bomb threat in a text message on Friday morning, marking the third time in just a week that Jewish institutions in New York City were targeted.
The Jewish Association Serving the Aging in Coney Island was threatened at about 8:45 a.m., and police were on site 15 minutes later, according to DNAinfo. It wasn’t immediately clear who sent the text.
More than 80 Jewish centers across the nation have received more than 100 bomb threats since January. Over the past few days, New York City organizations have been targeted at least three times, and a fourth threat was sent upstate to a Jewish community center in Rochester.
On Thursday, the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn was evacuated after receiving an email stating that pipe bombs had been hidden throughout the center. The Anti-Defamation League offices in Manhattan received a threat last Tuesday, and it wasn’t the first time. Their New York headquarters also received a threat on Feb. 22.
“We’ve never seen such a period of concentrated threats against the Jewish community,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday at the Staten Island Jewish Community Center, according to DNAinfo. “Just the last two weeks are more trouble than anything I’ve seen in many, many years.”
Congress has been pushing for more federal action this month after waves of threats continued to exhaust resources at so many institutions. The JCC Association of North America, meanwhile, has grown furious due to inaction by the federal government.
“We insist that all relevant federal agencies, including your own, apply all the resources available to identify and bring the perpetrator or perpetrators, who are trying to instill anxiety and fear in communities across the country, to justice,” the organization said in a letter penned to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security pledged to fully join the FBI’s investigation into “apparent hate-inspired attacks and harassment against individuals and communities,” said Secretary John F. Kelly.
All the threats have been deemed hoaxes, but the method has varied from disguised phone calls to emails and texts. So far only one arrest has been made in connection to the threats, though the suspect, Juan Thompson, is implicated in only eight threats and allegedly carried them out to harass his former girlfriend.