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.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, confirmed that he would ask Jessica Tisch to stay on as the city’s police commissioner if elected, ending longstanding speculation over his plans for a key role in his potential administration.

Tisch, appointed last year by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, “took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,” Mamdani said at the second and final general election debate on Wednesday evening.

“I have said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence, and the alignment will be of that position,” Mamdani added. “And I am confident that under a Mamdani administration, we would continue to deliver on that same mission.”

Mamdani’s choice could assuage concerns among moderate Democrats and other crime-conscious New Yorkers who had been hopeful that he would choose Tisch, a widely respected technocrat who previously led the Department of Sanitation.

Tisch, 44, who is Jewish, has not said whether she would plan to continue in her position if Mamdani is elected on Nov. 4. 

Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and Queens state assemblyman, has faced scrutiny over his past comments on law enforcement — including support for defunding the police. He has moderated during his mayoral campaign and says he no longer backs such efforts, even as he has pledged to pursue some goals that could potentially fuel tension, such as launching a Department of Community Safety “to ensure that mental health experts” instead of police “are responding to the mental health crisis,” he said at the debate. 

Mandani’s opponents, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, also said they would not seek to replace Tisch, though Sliwa, the Republican nominee, said he did not think she would choose to remain in her role if Cuomo or Mamdani is elected. Cuomo, running as an independent, said he did not believe Mamdani would follow through on his promise.

“His position has been to defund, disband the police, she wouldn’t take that,” Cuomo claimed, saying “their philosophies are totally incongruous.”

Elsewhere in the debate Wednesday, Cuomo and Sliwa ramped up their attacks on Mamdani over his strident opposition to Israel and refusal to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada,” continued sources of concern among Jewish voters.

Cuomo, who has recently escalated his criticism of Mamdani to a more personal level, accused him of stoking “the flames of hatred against Jewish people” during a particularly heated moment at the debate — while Sliwa cast the Democratic frontrunner as an “arsonist who fans the flames of antisemitism.”

Mamdani, playing defense on an issue that represents one of his top vulnerabilities, said that there “is room for disagreement on many positions and many policies,” and pushed back against Sliwa’s claim that he supports “global jihad.”

“I’ve heard from New Yorkers about their fears about antisemitism in this city, and what they deserve is a leader who takes it seriously, who roots it out of these five boroughs, not weaponizes it as a means by which to score political points on a debate stage,” Mamdani said.