A Russian woman accused of stabbing two Orthodox Jewish men in Manhattan’s Diamond District on Oct. 21 was previously arrested for attacking a Jewish teenager outside a Brooklyn yeshiva in June 2025, federal prosecutors revealed in a filing on Wednesday.
Anna Mochalova, 32, was charged with two federal hate crimes on Wednesday. Prosecutors asked the court to detain her pending trial, arguing that she poses a continuing threat to the Jewish community.
She faces up to 20 years in prison for the two federal crimes.
“A hate crime is a message written in violence, and this defendant’s message was loud and clear,” stated New York City Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
“As alleged in the complaint, Anna Mochalova attacked two visibly Jewish New Yorkers, striking fear in an entire community,” the Jewish commissioner said. “Every New Yorker has the right to walk our streets safe from hatred and violence, and the NYPD will always hold those who threaten that right accountable.”
In a seven-page letter to Robert Lehrburger, a federal magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, prosecutors wrote that Mochalova approached a Jewish teenager who was wearing a kippah and tzitzit on June 18, 2025, took his cellphone and threw it on the ground.
The Justice Department said that both victims wore kippas and that one “who has a beard, was wearing attire traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men, including a black hat, a black suit, a white shirt and tzitzit.”
Police body-camera footage captured her admitting that she threw the phone. She claimed that the teen and his friends laughed at her and recorded her.
Mochalova told officers that she had visited the yeshiva, which she called a “church,” while searching for someone she believed had assaulted her friend’s children in Los Angeles.
During the encounter, she repeatedly referred to “the Jewish community” and appeared frustrated while describing how the Jewish teenagers had allegedly treated her when she asked them if they knew the person in Los Angeles, prosecutors wrote.
The letter does not say how the 2025 case was resolved, but prosecutors cited the incident as evidence that the Manhattan attacks were part of a pattern of targeting “any observably Jewish person who crosses her path.”
According to the letter, Mochalova was arrested in 2025 and “provided law enforcement agents with a Russian passport.”
Three days after the recent attacks in Manhattan’s Diamond District, Mochalova was arrested on Oct. 24 for a transit violation in Brooklyn, according to the letter.
At the time of her arrest, she appeared to be wearing the same jacket seen in surveillance footage from the Diamond District attack, prosecutors said.
When officers asked for her address, she provided a Brooklyn location that investigators determined did not exist.
Mochalova is accused of stabbing her victims with a sharp object, likely a needle, but investigators have not recovered the weapon and do not know whether it contained any substance.
One victim was left bleeding and taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he was treated and released that day.
The second suffered a small cut to his forearm. According to prosecutors, Mochalova asked a third person if he was Jewish, and when he said that he was Muslim, she apologized and fled.
Mochalova was initially charged in state court and held at Rikers Island after failing to post bail, but was transferred to federal custody on Wednesday.
“If released, there is a significant risk that Mochalova will return to committing acts of violence against Jews and others,” prosecutors told the court. They called her a “flight risk.”
