Interpol, Sex Pistols and Bikini Kill are just a few of the other rebellious acts on the bill.
Day: September 22, 2026
Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers gathered in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Monday afternoon on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, to remember the lives lost in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Organized by progressive groups Jews For Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and Rabbis for Ceasefire, the Yizkor Ritual of Remembrance is the third annual event of its kind held in the location since the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel and the subsequent war escalations between Israel and Palestine.
The groups set up a stage in the shadow of the gigantic archway, where they delivered speeches and sang throughout the proceedings.
Speakers delivered their remarks from a lectern draped with the words, written in English and Hebrew, “For the sin of genocide, we atone,” using a term common in remarks among opponents of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which had been started in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. Supporters of Israel and members of the Jewish community have refuted the charge, and said that the use of “genocide” in describing the war has inflamed antisemitism locally and around the world.
Attendees donned white clothing and held memorial cards depicting the names of those who have perished in the ongoing battle in the Middle East. Dozens of elected officials and notable figures also joined the rally, including former New York City Comptroller (and Democratic Congressional nominee) Brad Lander, Mahmoud Khalil — who has been the subject of ICE detention — Brooklyn state Sen. Julia Salazar, and more.
Khalil, who became the target of the Trump administration following his role in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, said he brought a stone to remember the loss of life.
“We’re all humans. Whether I’m Palestinian, whether I’m Jewish, whether I’m anything,” he said.
Placing stones on graves is an ancient Jewish custom that signifies the importance of remembrance; it shows that a loved one cared enough to visit a grave and grieve for the loss.
After the hour-long ritual, hundreds solemnly walked to the fountain at Grand Army Plaza, and each person placed a stone on the name of a person who perished in the Middle East.
The high holy day of Yom Kippur is also marked by a day of atonement, something Lander said he wanted to acknowledge regarding the ongoing Middle Eastern death toll.
“As someone who feels a connection to Israel, who cares about it, I feel today so deeply that my confession must center on our complicity,” Lander said. “We have betrayed our deepest value: that every human being is created in God’s image.”
For years, the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) has been a troubled neighbor in Sunset Park, with a record of violence, staff shortages, prolonged lockdowns and other dangerous conditions behind its walls. Those conditions were the focus of a Sept. 19 town hall in Bay Ridge, where advocates shared findings from a three-month research project on life inside the federal jail.
Plagued by serious issues, including staff shortages, stabbings, killings, limited access to health care and prolonged lockdowns, the facility — a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) pretrial detention center and the only federal jail in New York City — drew national outrage after a power outage left prisoners without heat, hot food, proper sanitation or medical services in the dead of winter.
In an interview with The New York Times, former MDC warden Cameron Lindsay described the jail as “one of the most troubled, if not the most troubled facility in the Bureau of Prisons.” In 2024, a federal judge described conditions at the facility as “barbaric.”
At the town hall meeting at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, the Remedy Project, a youth-led prisoners’ rights advocacy group that files formal administrative remedies on behalf of people incarcerated in federal prisons, held its first public meeting to share findings from a three-month research project on conditions at MDC.
They also introduced the MDC Brooklyn Community Support Coalition, which includes the Remedy Project, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Brooklyn, Indivisible Brooklyn, South Brooklyn Sanctuary, New York City Anti-Repression Group (NYCARG), Federal Defenders of New York, MDC Solidarity and Envision Freedom Fund.
The coalition was founded in response to the escalating crisis at the prison and launched a campaign to expose what its members describe as inhumane conditions at MDC, while providing legal, material and emotional support to incarcerated and detained people and their families.
MDC currently holds male and female prisoners of all security levels across two buildings and 17-plus units. It is primarily a pretrial detention facility, with most people held there awaiting trial, arraignment or sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern or Southern Districts of New York. The facility also holds a small number of people serving sentences. Since June 2025, the Department of Homeland Security has used a wing of the prison to house immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Bureau of Prisons said MDC began accepting ICE detainees on June 20, 2025.
Anna Sugrue, co-founder and co-director of the Remedy Project, and Colin Adams, program director at the Remedy Project, briefed attendees, including Congressman-elect Brad Lander and Juan Carlos Ruiz, a reverend at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, on what they described as MDC’s living conditions, medical neglect, staff retaliation and civil rights abuses. They also discussed the administrative remedy process, which allows incarcerated people to formally complain about issues related to their confinement.
Commonly cited issues include frequent, unexpected and prolonged lockdowns, as well as more than 22 hours of confinement per day. The group also cited structural and environmental concerns, including mold, pest infestations, inedible food and disintegrating mattresses, some of which it said had reportedly been chewed by vermin. Other concerns include broken toilets that can go days without repair and cloudy, discolored water that smells of mildew.
The group also cited incidents of violence, including violence by staff, gang- and race-based violence, extortion, retaliation by staff — including against family members and lawyers — and sexual violence.
The Remedy Project first reached out to incarcerated people at MDC in May 2026. So far, the organization has registered 36 inmates and taken on 37 new cases, filing administrative remedies for many of them involving medical neglect, complaints against staff, safety and sanitation, environmental conditions, and access to mail, legal mail and the courts.
Incarcerated Remedy Project members reported that medical services at MDC were extremely inadequate. They said emergency call buttons have been out of service since 2021 and that doctors are not available after 5 p.m. or on weekends.
Incarcerated people also reported significant delays in seeing medical staff after submitting sick-call requests, limited or no access to medical devices for chronic health conditions, inadequate or nonexistent follow-up care after procedures, an inability to access medical records and a lack of treatment for injuries.
One member fell and broke his spine but was not taken to a hospital for 43 days, according to the Remedy Project. When he was finally taken to a hospital, an MRI confirmed that he had broken his neck and three vertebrae in his back. He received minimal physical therapy at a rehabilitation facility, where he was chained to his bed, often for 24 hours at a time. When he returned to MDC, staff withheld his medical records and confiscated his cane, the organization said.
Another member was taken off MDC’s opioid use disorder program without explanation, according to the Remedy Project. In a desperate attempt to obtain medication, he begged other inmates in the program to share their saliva containing Suboxone, a prescription medication containing buprenorphine and naloxone used to treat opioid use disorder, so that he could feel normal.
When he asked a counselor to put him back on the program, the counselor suggested he continue getting it through “people’s mouths,” according to the member.
One Remedy Project member recently suffered two heart attacks. He was taken to NYU Langone Hospital, where prison staff wanted the hospital to perform surgery without preparation or advance notice to his family, according to the organization. When he refused the procedure and was discharged, he was sent back to MDC and suffered a severe anxiety attack.
Incarcerated people also reported that MDC staff obstruct access to the courts and legal materials, particularly affecting people representing themselves who must prepare their cases from inside the prison. But people with private and public legal representation have reported similar incidents, according to the Remedy Project.
The group said staff have denied free and unmonitored legal calls, deliberately ignored court orders issued by judges regarding legal access, degraded evidence during the mail-receipt process and failed to provide enough stamps for individuals to send mail to the courts. The group also reported problems with legal mail, including delayed deliveries, mail being opened without the recipient present, legal mail being designated as regular mail and signatures being forged for recipients.
Staff misconduct and retaliation, according to the Remedy Project, range from refusing to provide or accept administrative remedy filings and inciting violence by placing individuals in dangerous situations to refusing visitation and frequently and excessively using solitary confinement.
In September, a gang-related brawl left multiple inmates stabbed and slashed, according to the organization. Federal prosecutors have separately charged inmates in connection with a February 2025 fight at MDC that resulted in at least five inmates being hospitalized and at least 10 appearing to have stab or slash wounds.
One incarcerated person said counselors will only write up Black men. One counselor was quoted as saying, “It’s too much color in here; some of y’all have to go into the box [solitary].”
Adams said their presentation was only a summary of their findings at MDC.
“The patterns that we mentioned here today are just symptomatic and a small snapshot of the patterns that we have seen across the country over the last five years, and we have no doubt that these are just a representation of the issues that are experienced in every prison and detention center in this country,” Adams noted.
Sugrue told Brooklyn Paper that when incarcerated people sign up with the Remedy Project, they know they are taking a risk by working with an outside advocacy organization, but that the organization was “very, very conscientious” about the relationships it was building with its incarcerated members at MDC.
“It is a risky thing; being incarcerated and advocating for yourself is a risky thing. I think those risks are not a reason not to take them. It’s just about building the support for folks to be able to take those risks with a little bit more safety and with people behind them who are willing to stand up for them if things go south,” Sugrue said. “But I think for a lot of these people, they’re experiencing like horribly torturous conditions, and so the idea of those conditions getting slightly worse is not even that scary.”
Dwayne Stone, a formerly incarcerated person, also attended the event. He told Brooklyn Paper that he spent 21 years in federal prison, including at MDC, which he described as “dehumanizing,” citing a lack of underclothes, sleeping on the floor for years, lockdowns and no access to outdoor space or a proper yard.
“You wouldn’t think that your government, you know, would treat you like you know people come in there and it’s just like a lack of respect for humanity. The guards don’t respect you, and they talk to you crazy, like you’re a dog. You know, animals get treated better. The firsthand look at how our government treats its citizens is just terrible,” he said, praising the MDC Brooklyn Community Support Coalition for supporting incarcerated people and trying to change the system.
“What these people in this organization are doing is uplifting, because when I was going through my situation with the court system and the justice system, I didn’t have this. There was nobody besides my family and individuals that just loved me outside of being my relatives, who even cared about anything that was going on with me,” Stone said. “So this organization, it’s like a foundational piece to try to start to change the environment that we’re in right now because it’s needed.”
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told Brooklyn Paper in a statement that the agency takes its responsibility to provide safe, secure and humane conditions for individuals “entrusted in their custody” seriously. The spokesperson said MDC Brooklyn operates within the security, staffing, infrastructure and operational demands of a federal detention facility.
“In order to maintain the safety and security of individuals housed within our institution, Wardens may establish controls or implement temporary security measures to ensure the good order and security of their institution. Modified operations refer to a temporary change to some institution operations that may include inmate movement, programs, and/or services,” the statement reads.
The agency said such measures are generally used while officials investigate incidents and work to ensure the safety of staff and inmates.
“Ordinarily, institutions remain on modified operations in order to thoroughly investigate an incident and ensure the safety of staff and inmates. However, with respect to the day-to-day operations of the facility during modified operations, all inmates have access to unit team staff, medical care, food, water, and other programs.”
A Bronx-based cannabis dispensary is broadening its reach with a new location in Harlem.
This past summer, Hibernica opened its new Central Park North store, located at 111 W. 110th St. The first store, located at 3220 Westchester Ave. in Pelham Bay, opened on April 20, 2024, with the goal of bringing sustainable, locally sourced products to the market while weaving hospitality into the customer experience.
Like the Pelham Bay store, the Central Park North Hibernica offers a robust lineup of cannabis products, including flower, pre-rolls, vaporizers, edibles and more.
“Everything started with me and my brother. We pioneered the [Pelham Bay] location up there for the last 2.5 years. We have a lot of the community around us,” said Jonathan Guerrero, general manager of Hibernica. “It was a family-owned business and I was thrust into it with open arms. My roots are in hospitality; I’ve consumed [cannabis] my whole life, and taking that and combining it with the restaurant hospitality and being able to create an actual business from it, that was just my dream to be able to align my passion with my career.”
Guerrero told amNewYork that bringing the next Hibernica location to Harlem was a no-brainer. He grew up in the area just a few blocks from the new store location, so when it came to expanding, they jumped on the opportunity.
Guerrero also said that Harlem and cannabis have seen a lot of growth in a positive direction, giving the location of the new Hibernica store more meaning.
“Harlem and cannabis have had an interesting past being as how the legislation in the past has been a little bit more strict for areas like this, so to be able to see it change completely is like a breath of fresh air,” said Guerrero. “I remember being young and being around friends who consumed, and then it was a little bit taboo; it just wasn’t allowed. So now just to be able to make a career out of it and to be able to educate people and get people out of that stigma is incredibly wonderful and gratifying.”
For the new Central Park North store, Guerrero said that keeping their hospitality-driven experience going like they have in the Pelham Bay store. From the moment they walk through the door, customers are made to feel welcome from the staff.
“We pretty much always make everybody feel welcome. We always look in the eye, we smile at them and greet them very warmly,” said Guerrero. “Everybody here does a wonderful job of having a very enthusiastic energy and so everybody here that comes in, we make sure that we figure out what exactly why are they here. Everybody here does their best to create interpersonal relationships with the community just to help create that bond of trust.”
Hibernica held its grand opening celebration back in August, offering daily brand pop-ups, giveaways, and cannabis education. The store kicked off its first Central Park Clean-Up on Aug. 29, the first of many events that Hibernica will host for the community. Guerrero says that Hibernica plans on collaborating with other local businesses in the area to further build community with their neighbors and customers.
“Harlem is very community-driven, very tight-knit. So we are gonna definitely do much more collabs with the businesses in the area and see how we can impact our community,” said Guerrero. “In Pelham Bay, we’ve donated more than 300 meals last Thanksgiving for the Open Hand Association. We wanna continue to do things like that here so that we’re not just a retail shop; we wanna actually make an impact and being from this area, seeing it grow is a dream come true.”
For more information, visit shophibernica.com.
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