New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani toured the Jewish Children’s Museum in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on Monday — accompanied by the police commissioner, the local city councilmember and a co-founder of the museum’s, but no press or local religious leaders.

The mayor’s stop was first reported by Chabad community news site COLlive, which shared a photo of him entering the building alongside NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and inside the lobby with Tisch and Councilmember Crystal Hudson. In another image was Devorah Halberstam, one of the museum’s founders, who COLlive reported provided a “closed-door tour.”

The mayor’s daily schedule released Sunday night said only that Mamdani would visit “a Children’s Museum” in a 1 p.m. slot, and noted it was closed to the press.

Halberstam told Jewish Insider she connected with the mayor following the car-ramming of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters, which sits a few hundred feet from the museum and serves as the spiritual center of the neighborhood, and that a meeting had been in the works since before Passover. During his visit Monday, she said she and the mayor discussed her son Ari, a 16-year-old yeshiva student murdered in an antisemitic shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, in whose honor she founded the museum in 2004.

Halberstam said that she took the mayor through a floor of the museum dedicated to Jewish holidays, and characterized him as a “very good listener” and “a work in progress” on issues of concern to the Jewish community, particularly the kind of hate and terror incidents that took the life of her son.

“Hopefully there will be movement in different directions. And I hope to help him along with doing that as it applies to the Jewish community,” Halberstam told JI. “He’s young, he’s new to this, he’s on a learning curve, but he definitely wants to learn.”

A source from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement said they were unaware of the mayor’s visit, as did Rabbi Chanina Sperlin of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council. Sperlin, however, noted that the museum was Halberstam’s “baby” and that she was the community leader most involved with it.

Mamdani’s office did not respond to questions from Jewish Insider about the mayor’s visit. However, he shared a photospray from the visit on X, along with praise for Halberstam.

“Devorah Halberstam has spent her life advocating for the safety and well-being of Jewish New Yorkers,” the tweet from the mayor’s official account reads, noting that May is Jewish American Heritage Month. “We discussed the importance of ensuring this city remains a place where Jewish history can be celebrated and shared with everyone — including young New Yorkers. This Jewish American Heritage Month, we honor the rich culture and history that Jewish New Yorkers contribute to our city daily.”

Halberstam has served in a number of public roles, including currently as honorary commissioner of community affairs and chair of the Hate Crime Review Panel at the NYPD. Former Mayor Eric Adams appointed her chair of the board of commissioners at the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.

The first mayor to seek a relationship with the museum was Michael Bloomberg, who also supported it financially.