“It wasn’t really a real demonstration,” said Sherry Kirschenbaum, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Theological Seminary, where five adults and one child protested for less than two hours on Saturday. “There were very few people and nobody really for them to engage with.”

The group’s leader, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., who is also the father or grandfather of much of its membership, is known for his vitriolic anti-gay views. He has picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay man beaten and left to die in 1998 in Wyoming, as well as the funerals of soldiers, arguing that American combat deaths are God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Since April, Mr. Phelps has made Jews his primary target, protesting at Jewish institutions around the country, according to Marilyn Mayo, a director of the Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League, which has tracked the group for many years. One of those institutions was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where a security guard was fatally shot this month; a white supremacist has been charged in the murder.

“The fact that this organization targeted New York City for a weekend where they could go synagogue to synagogue spewing anti-Semitism and also homophobia is just the height of ignorance and hatred,” said the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who was one of more than 100 counterprotesters gathered Sunday morning at the Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a gay synagogue in Greenwich Village.

Rebekah Phelps-Davis, 48, said that her group had come to New York to take on the large Jewish population for its support of “the homosexual agenda.” To that end, around noon on Sunday, she stood near the entrance to Central Park at 72nd Street, cordoned off by blue wooden police sawhorses. The group was out of sight of its intended target — a celebration inside the park marking the centennial of Tel Aviv — but its members did their best to provoke those who happened by. (“We do not intend to convert the devil,” she explained.)