(JTA) — Aaron Mostofsky, an Orthodox Jewish man who participated in the Capitol mob last week wearing fur pelts and a bulletproof vest, was arrested by the FBI at his home in Brooklyn Tuesday morning.
Videos circulating on social media Tuesday morning showed several FBI agents outside his home. One video showed an FBI agent carrying a fur pelt out of the home. State police officers were also visible in the videos.
The arrest comes amid a nationwide crackdown on the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building last week. While police on the scene initially allowed most people who breached the building to leave, many are now being arrested in their home cities, often after efforts by online sleuths to identify them from the videos and photographs that emerged during the violent and chaotic siege.
Mostofsky was one of dozens of “persons of interest” sought by Washington police for unlawful entry to the building. He was among the Orthodox Jews who came to the Capitol to protest, telling the New York Post that he wanted “to express my opinion as a free American that this election was stolen” from President Donald Trump.
Mostofsky is the son of Steven (Shlomo) Mostofsky, a Kings County Supreme Court Judge and former president of the National Council of Young Israel, an Orthodox synagogue association that has been outspokenly pro-Trump in the past. Mostofsky’s brother, Nachman, who serves as executive director of Chovevei Zion, a politically conservative Orthodox Jewish advocacy organization, also attended the protest in Washington last Wednesday but said he left before the mob entered the Capitol.
“No conservative will condone what happened today, the actual storming of the Capitol … it was unpatriotic,” Nachman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the day of the riots, before his brother was publicly identified as a participant in the violence. “But we heard for months during the summer when people don’t feel heard, this is what happens.”
