Great Neck library board candidate who was target of verbal attacks wins by wide margin

A Great Neck Library Board candidate who was the target of verbal attacks handily defeated her opponent in a race that drew a large turnout and was tinged by rhetoric that many residents called divisive.

Mimi Hu won a four-year term as a trustee, receiving 1,389 votes to Qiping Zhang’s 761 votes. Zhang had mounted a write-in campaign for the seat.

A total of 2,369 ballots were cast on Monday. Scott Sontag, Chelsea Sassouni and Josie Pizer were also elected.

Hu, an immigrant from China who lives in Great Neck, said Wednesday that she was “truly honored that the community had selected me to serve them” and that this was the reason she ran for the board.

She will serve a four-year term that ends in January 2023.

Library board trustee Weihua Yan said Monday’s turnout was “phenomenal” and probably about 10 times that of last year’s election. At one point, organizers ran out of ballots for the voting machines and emergency paper ballots had be used, he said.

Some residents attributed the strong turnout to polarization in the community following an Oct. 20 incident at the Great Neck Street Fair involving Hu and supporters of the write-in candidate, Zhang.

Hu, who has been supportive of the LGBTQ community, said she was at the fair with her 6-year-old son. She captured the incident on video, which shows two women standing near the Great Neck Republicans table shouting at her. The women in the video match the Facebook profiles of Mersedeh Rofeim and Valerie Shalit, both of Great Neck. Rofeim is shown holding a stack of flyers for Zhang and repeatedly saying, “Shame on you.” At one point in the video, she holds the flyers up with both hands and says to Hu, “This is who we want. Not trash.”

Shalit is heard on the video saying, “You’re a communist fascist. You’re against my ideology,” and that Hu would never be elected to the library board.

In a Facebook post that has since been deleted, Shalit wrote that she was “defending the right for little children to come to the library and not be bombarded by sexual deviants.”

Rofeim and Shalit did not respond to requests for comment.

Local and elected officials denied that the women were members of the Great Neck Republican Committee or campaigning for state Sen. Elaine Phillips (R-Flower Hill). Zhang wrote in an email that the women did not “represent me or anything that I stand for.”

Voters interviewed outside the polls denounced the verbal attacks against Hu, which they called damaging to the community.

“I have lived in Great Neck since 1981 and I am so embarrassed for the community,” said Judi Rosenzweig, 71. “You can have your feeling, but to do this is just an abomination.”

Shelly Feldman, 61, said that residents were showing up at the polls to protest hate speech, which she said is a national issue.

“That isn’t the way to behave to each other,” Feldman said. “It stems from above, the rhetoric and hatred we’re seeing come from the executive office.”

The election was not without incident. A verbal altercation between a resident and Rofeim, and Rofeim and a Newsday reporter resulted in the Nassau County police being called to the library.

“I definitely did not expect this election to be so contentious,” said Hu, a third-year law student at New York University. “I’ve truly learned a lot and I’ve also learned that there are just really very many voices in our community, and I hope we can all listen to each other.”