Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Police investigate explosive device thrown in heavily Jewish New Jersey town

Nobody was injured and no arrests have yet been made

Police in the New Jersey town of Lakewood are investigating after an explosive device was thrown in a heavily Jewish area on Saturday. 

Video obtained by local news outlet the Lakewood Scoop and uploaded to YouTube showed the residents walking on the sidewalk when the two trucks slowed and stopped next to them. The residents can be seen crossing the street behind the trucks, when they drive off. Second later, the explosion can be seen and smoke begins to rise from a nearby wooded area. 

Lakewood police captain Gregory Staffordsmith said in an email that the department received a call just before 9:30 p.m. on Saturday reporting the explosion and smoke. An officer was dispatched to the scene, where a resident told him two vehicles had been driving slowly through the area before they heard a loud boom.

Staffordsmith said a small object with a lit fuse was thrown from one of the trucks and that the pedestrians had been 50 to 100 feet away. Nobody was injured in the incident. 

Lakewood is a predominantly Jewish area. In 2019, NJ.com estimated that two-thirds of the 100,000 residents were Orthodox Jews. The town has been the site of several antisemitic incidents in recent years. In November 2020, a dead pig was left outside a rabbi’s home while in May of that year, a man was arrested for posting threatening messages to Facebook against Jews in the area who ignored COVID-19 public health restrictions. 

No arrests have been made and Staffordsmith asked that anyone with information contact Detective Kevin Donnelly at 732-363-0200 ext. 5346.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.