Racial Violence Boils In Brooklyn -- N.Y. Mayor Attacked As He Urges Peace
NEW YORK - Mayor David Dinkins tried to calm tension between ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews and blacks in Brooklyn, but a jeering, bottle-throwing crowd chased him away and violence continued today.
The unrest in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood began Monday night after a black child was struck and killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew. A rabbinical student was fatally stabbed by a black man hours later in what police say was a revenge killing.
Police reported 44 arrests by yesterday. At least 106 people were injured, including journalists, firefighters and 86 police officers, eight of whom were hit by shotgun pellets.
Early today, Dinkins and Police Commissioner Lee Brown visited the wounded at Kings County Hospital. They told reporters they would not impose a curfew in Crown Heights.
Hundreds of blacks, some carrying baseball bats, bottles or rocks, attacked the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect yesterday. They shouted "War" and "Soon!" and threw rocks and bottles. About 100 Jews threw rocks back. Club-wielding police in riot gear separated the two groups.
One group of blacks burned an Israeli flag; some held signs with anti-Semitic slogans. Groups of blacks rampaged through the neighborhood, damaging police vehicles and stores.
"This is Nazi Germany all over again," said City Councilman Noach Dear, an Orthodox Jew who was pelted by rocks.
Dinkins decided yesterday afternoon it was too dangerous to take a planned walking tour through the neighborhood. Instead, he visited the family of 7-year-old Gavin Cato, who was struck and killed by a car in the entourage of the Lubavitcher spiritual leader, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The child's cousin, Angela Cato, also 7, was critically injured.
Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, was jeered and booed as he tried to speak to the black crowd through a megaphone.
"With respect to the driver of the car, that matter will be presented to a grand jury," Dinkins said. "In the meantime, we've got to increase the peace. I do want justice. We all want justice. But we will not get it with violence."
About 50 police officers escorted Dinkins to his car as the crowd threw bottles at him.
No charges have yet been brought against the driver, Yoseph Lisef, 22, said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.
Rumors that a Hasidic ambulance crew tended to Lisef rather than the injured children helped spark the riots, although police later said they told the ambulance crew to take the driver away.
A black youth, Lemrick Nelson, 16, was charged yesterday with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a Hasidic student from Australia. Rosenbaum was not involved in the car accident, but police said he was apparently killed in retaliation.
Crown Heights has long been plagued with racial animosity. Members of the Lubavitcher sect blame local blacks for crime in the neighborhood; blacks charge the Jewish sect wields too much power and receives preferential treatment.