NEW YORK (VINnews) — At the Siyum Hashas, Yonatan Gray stood out like a striped thumb.

As he entered the Subway, he also stood out to the anti-Semitic train rider that sat across from him.

In this episode, he was not sporting his Waldo costume nor anything else that would standout from the others riding the train. The only thing different was that he was wearing a Yarmulke, which is the catalyst that set off the lady sitting across from him on the train.

He wrote on his twitter feed following the verbal assault:

This is real.Just happened to me. Walked onto the NYC subway wearing my yarmulke. (Costume off) and this lady started yelling and cursing at me. Including F&@k all you Jews.Tried to film quickly. And she threatened to beat me up. Having the station attendant call the police now.

He followed up that he filed a police report and that it had been filed as a hate crime.

For weeks, anti-Semitic attacks have been surging in and around New York City — from assaults in Brooklyn to the shooting in Jersey City to the recent stabbing in Monsey on Hanukkah.

Eric Ward, an anti-racist activist who is African-American and frequently speaks about the danger of anti-Semitism, says Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn live in many of the same neighborhoods as black people and are sometimes turned into scapegoats for racism and other societal challenges.

“Black people aren’t in poverty and racial segregation because of the ultra-Orthodox community,” he said. “They are facing those things because of longstanding white supremacy in New York, in terms of policies and in terms of values. The problem is that there is a segment of black population who believes that Jews can be targeted out of those frustrations, and when bad interactions happen between the ultra-Orthodox and the black community it reinforces to that smaller part of the black population that their anti-Semitic beliefs are justified.”

Earlier this year, the ADL found that 2018 saw the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents since 1979.

What’s still unclear is why the spike is happening now — and whether the attacks are connected.

See the footage below: