Racial Unrest: An Eye for an Eye

By SAM ALLIS/CROWN HEIGHTS

The flowers at the sidewalk shrine for Gavin Cato were wilting in the relentless August sun last week, but the rage of local blacks toward Hasidic Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., was undiminished. WE WANT THE JEWISH MURDERER ARRESTED NOW, read one sign there. NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, read another. THE WHITE IS THE DEVIL, proclaimed still another.

The latest flare-up of black-Jewish tensions was sparked on the hot, muggy evening of Aug. 19, when a station wagon driven by a Hasidic Jew ran a red light, collided with another car, then jumped the curb and struck two black children. Gavin Cato, 7, was killed, and his cousin Angela Cato, 7, was seriously injured. Crown Heights blacks became enraged that the driver, Yosef Lifsh, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect, was not arrested and charged with Cato's death. Their anger was compounded by the false rumor that Lifsh was drunk and by the fact that he was immediately whisked away in a private Lubavitcher ambulance while city emergency-service members worked to free the two Cato cousins pinned under the car.

A mob formed at the accident scene and flowed like quicksilver into the surrounding streets. Three hours later, Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a visiting Hasidic scholar from Australia, was stabbed to death by a group of marauding black youths intent on avenging Cato's death. A 16-year-old was charged with the murder.

The accident touched off four nights of rioting. New York City Mayor David Dinkins responded by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks. Before an uneasy calm was restored, 163 people were arrested, 66 civilians and 168 police officers injured, 25 patrol cars damaged and three stores looted. Among the injured was Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who was attacked in his taxi by a large crowd of black youths. He was beaten and stripped to his underpants. It was the city's worst racial violence & since the outbreak that followed Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.

The hostilities were aggravated by the Rev. Al Sharpton, the ubiquitous black demagogue, who whipped up the crowd at Gavin Cato's funeral early last week. "They don't want peace," he said of the Hasidic Jews. "They want quiet." Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.

The main battle cry of Crown Heights blacks has been "equal justice" -- meaning that if a black youth was charged with murder in the Rosenbaum stabbing, the Hasidic driver should also be charged in Cato's death. Insisting that "they are different cases," Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes was leading a grand jury investigation into the traffic fatality. But given the history of such cases and the state law governing them, it seemed unlikely that Lifsh would be charged. The announcement to that effect, if and when it comes, is likely to cause more angry outbursts.

Behind the violence lay decades of uneasy coexistence between local blacks and members of the Lubavitcher sect, who established their world headquarters there in 1940. Lubavitcher Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky claims that "Crown Heights is a model community of integration where whites and blacks live in peace together." But blacks describe a different atmosphere. "The Hasidim set up an apartheid situation in Crown Heights," says Dr. Vernal Cave, a black dermatologist who has lived in the area for 36 years. Cave claims that the Lubavitchers have long received preferential treatment from police and city authorities. In particular, he says, the sect caused resentment in the past by pressuring Jewish shopkeepers in the neighborhood to close their doors on Saturday and by prevailing on police to block off the streets near their synagogues during the Sabbath. Said another local black man: "You've got to be blind, deaf and dumb not to know about the problems here with the Hasidim."

One thing is clear: there is little common ground between the two groups. Nor have leaders from either side reached out to the other in an effort to defuse the situation. Instead they have engaged in a bitter public debate in which heated rhetoric far outweighs the language of reason and compromise. While blacks like Cave speak of apartheid, Lubavitcher leaders evoke visions of pogroms and Kristallnacht. "First Crown Heights, then Washington Heights, then the Golan Heights," says Rabbi Shmuel Butman. "This is a Jewish issue."

What is needed now is neither Sharpton's bombast nor visions of the Holocaust, but a serious effort by both sides to create lasting peace in a community riven by mutual mistrust. Unfortunately, the greater likelihood is that the tensions will continue to seethe and flare anew. "They're not finished yet," said a black teenage girl near the accident scene last week. Asked who is not finished, she replied, "Everybody."