Father of Crown Heights Victim Dies in Australia

SYDNEY, Australia — Max Rosenbaum, whose son Yankel was killed in an assault that fueled violent race riots in New York in 1991, has died after suffering a major heart attack, relatives said Sunday. He was 85.

Rosenbaum died at a hospital in Melbourne late Friday, said his surviving son, Norman.

His other son, Yankel Rosenbaum, a Hasidic scholar and doctoral student from Australia, was attacked by a mob after a Hasidic driver accidentally hit and killed a 7-year-old black boy in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section in August 1991.

Irate blacks formed a mob that descended on Rosenbaum on Aug. 19 yelling, “Get the Jew!” Rosenbaum, stabbed four times, died a day later. He was 29.

The violence continued for more than two days as black youths swept through the neighborhood, burning police cars, looting stores and throwing bottles.

The riot helped shape the course of New York City politics, contributing to then-Mayor David Dinkins’ loss to Rudy Giuliani in 1993. Jewish groups and a state investigation faulted Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, for not taking more decisive steps to stop the Crown Heights violence.

Max Rosenbaum, his wife, Fay, and their son Norman made regular appearances at court hearings in the cases against Yankel Rosenbaum’s alleged assailants.

Lemrick Nelson, who was 16 at the time of the attack, was acquitted of state murder charges but convicted of federal civil rights charges in the 1990s. An appeals court later overturned the federal conviction, saying the judge had tampered with the racial makeup of the jury.

In 2003, a new jury found Nelson guilty of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but released within a year because of time he had already served.

Co-defendant Charles Price, accused of instigating blacks to assault Jews after the 7-year-old’s death, ultimately pleaded guilty in 2002 to violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. Price was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in prison, more than half of which he had already served.

Norman Rosenbaum remembered his father as a tireless crusader for civil rights, who was determined “that no other person would ever be subjected to the same type of violence” because of their race or ethnicity.

As soon as the father learned the circumstances of his son Yankel’s killing, “he made a commitment not for revenge, but to obtain justice for my brother,” he told The Associated Press.