The New York Police Department “insisted” that the son of the late writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Elisha Wiesel, remove his Israeli flag from sight on Sunday after he was harangued by anti-Israel demonstrators at Pennsylvania Station, North America’s busiest passenger transportation facility. 

Mr. Wiesel told the Sun that unmarked police officers approached him at Penn Station’s Moynihan Train Hall and asked him to “help de-escalate” the unscheduled demonstration by putting away his flag. He was warned to comply with the requests so as to “prevent this thing from getting worse,” he recounted. 

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Mr. Wiesel said, “500 Hamas supporters shouting slogans surrounded us. I put on an Israeli flag I carry with me.” However, he added, the “NYPD insisted I remove the flag as [the] situation was getting dangerous.”

The son of the Nobel Prize-winning activist posted a video of the encounter along with his statement. 

The protest that Mr. Wiesel encountered was organized by an anti-Israel activist group, Within Our Lifetime. On social media and at protests, the group has promoted Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel as resistance “by any means necessary.”

Footage posted on X captures swarms of demonstrators draped in Palestinian paraphernalia barging past police officers and into the train hall. Once inside, the demonstrators blocked entrances to the train platforms and proceeded to engage in an Islamic prayer, another video on X showed. 

The demonstration at Penn Station comes in the wake of an onslaught of disruption to transit and holiday events at New York, home of the Jewish diaspora, by anti-Israel demonstrators. Disruptions at Grand Central Terminal and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, along with blockades earlier in the day on the Manhattan Bridge, have been but a few of the disruptions caused across America and Europe by activists. The protests on Sunday were part of the “global strike” organized by anti-Israel demonstrators. 

Mr. Wiesel told the Sun that he happened to stumble upon the protest by sheer coincidence. “My son and I sort of noticed it. And they were happening around us,” he stated. “So we have our yarmulkes, which we put on.” Mr Wiesel also happened to be carrying an Israeli flag that he was waiting to bring to his house, which he also brought out. 

The finance executive declined to comment on what his father, who died in 2016, would have thought of the incident, saying he did not want to put words into his father’s mouth. He said, though, that he is more than willing, as his father’s only son who was profoundly influenced by him, to share his own thoughts.

Elie Wiesel was a Nobel laureate who detailed his experience as a teenager surviving the Auschwitz death camp in his hugely influential 1960 memoir, “Night.” Mr. Wiesel was also an ardent defender of the Jewish state, emerging a year before his passing as a critic of President Obama’s positioning on Iran as it related to the threat to Israel. 

His son, Elisha Wiesel, is a former partner at Goldman Sachs, where he worked as the chief information officer during his 25-year tenure at the firm. He currently works as the chief risk officer for a hedge fund, ClearAlpha Technologies.