Phylisa Wisdom, the liberal activist appointed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as executive director of his Office to Combat Antisemitism, got a harsh reception at a Holocaust memorial event in Brooklyn on Sunday.

Wisdom appeared at a gathering at Holocaust Memorial Park in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, home to a large Russian-speaking Jewish community, and adjacent to the Orthodox Jewish enclave in Manhattan Beach — both politically conservative areas at odds with the left-wing Mamdani administration. 

Video from the event shows a small group of hecklers booing and calling Wisdom a “kapo,” a term for concentration camp inmates who served as overseers during the Holocaust, and shouting that she was supportive of Adolf Hitler, as organizers of the event called for police to remove them.

“If City Hall declined the invite to speak at this Holocaust memorial, it would have been called antisemitism,” Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick wrote on X. “We can disagree without these disgusting attacks. What message does this send about our community?”

Spitalnick serves on the board of New York Jewish Agenda, the group Wisdom led before joining the mayor’s team. 

The Holocaust Memorial Committee, which organized the gathering to honor local survivors of the Nazi genocide, declined to comment. Republican Assemblyman Michael Novakhov boycotted the event over Wisdom’s participation.