Cops and city officials have quietly gone on high alert, worried that another riot could be in the works.
The troubles began on April 14, when Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Kingsborough Community College, says he and a friend encountered a pair of young Jewish men while walking down Albany Ave. about 6 p.m.
“One was on bike, one was on foot. They were staring at us, staring us down,” Charles told me. “We stared back. They approached us and asked if we had a problem.”
NY Daily News Op-Ed: ‘Tribal’ tension in Crown Heights keeps neighborhood from moving beyond hate
Nearly 17 years after riots tore Crown Heights apart, the recent beating of a black college student by Jewish assailants has exposed rising tensions between blacks and Jews in my neighborhood.
Cops and city officials have quietly gone on high alert, worried that another riot could be in the works.
The troubles began on April 14, when Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Kingsborough Community College, says he and a friend encountered a pair of young Jewish men while walking down Albany Ave. about 6 p.m.
“One was on bike, one was on foot. They were staring at us, staring us down,” Charles told me. “We stared back. They approached us and asked if we had a problem.”
The man on the bike sprayed Charles with tear gas, and a few minutes later a contingent of Jewish men arrived by car and in scooters and began chasing them.
One man beat Charles on the back and arm with a nightstick, inflicting injuries that sent him to the hospital. The group fled, but not before a witness on the street got the license plate number.
In any other neighborhood, a staredown between young men, even one that turns into a beatdown, would barely count as major news.
But this is Crown Heights, where a smoldering pile of intergroup grievances and injustices – some real, many imaginary – set the stage for the shocking outburst of mob violence in August 1991.
According to a memo circulated by Mayor Bloomberg’s Community Assistance Unit, city officials immediately descended on Crown Heights last week to establish “contact with the [Charles] family before outside agitators could jump in and reach out to the family to create community turmoil.”
I don’t know which “outside agitators” the mayor’s people were afraid of, but community activist Taharka Robinson, founder of the Central Brooklyn Anti-Violence Coalition, is acting as Charles’ adviser. The family also has retained Paul Wooten, a well-known Brooklyn lawyer recently nominated for a Supreme Court judgeship.
Robinson and Wooten are reliable, levelheaded men. They will have their work cut out for them.
At the urging of city officials, a group of leaders from both communities will meet tomorrow – “before the Sean Bell verdict,” the Community Assistance Unit memo cautions – to figure out a way to dial down the tension.
In the neighborhood’s calculus of tribal resentments, the attack on Charles was the mirror image of a January incident in which a teenage yeshiva student named Samuel Balkany said five black kids jumped and beat him, shouting “little Jew boy, you think you own this neighborhood,” and such.
Despite a call from authorities for help in solving the case, nobody was arrested for the Balkany beating. Let enough of these tribal skirmishes accumulate, and you end up with a neighborhood ready to explode.
Last week, much to their credit, cops from the 71st Precinct and Patrol Borough Brooklyn South quickly began a full-court press to solve the latest beating, with an extra incentive supplied by the fact that Charles’ father, Moses Charles, is a cop in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct.
The NYPD swiftly found the attackers’ car in East New York, stripped of plates but still traceable. At the car owner’s home, according to the Community Assistance Unit memo, cops arrested a man – believed to be the brother of the car’s owner – for interfering with government administration, and later released him.
All along the way, local politicians and community leaders – both black and Jewish – have been talking.
It’s a rotten shame that people in my neighborhood haven’t figured out how to live side by side, and an embarrassment that we have to rely on cops and nervous bureaucrats to keep the peace.
Nowhere in the city will you find more devout religious people than in Crown Heights, yet it has come to this – shortly after Easter and the Pope’s visit, and in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days.
Can’t we all just get along?
Meir C.
“Nowhere in the city will you find more devout religious people than in Crown Heights, yet it has come to this – shortly after Easter and the Pope’s visit, and in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days”.
As usual, you can count on the leftist liberal slant of the daily snooze to paint the picture of the Jews inciting the violence, when in fact, we are constantly the victim. Time after time, we read about how a Jewish person was mugged, beaten, threatened, and the recipient of anti-semitic vitriol. It’s a one way street, and one isolated event, initiated by young Jewish men, ‘allegedly’ unprovoked, has the potential to cause a “riot” in the community! Funny, you hear about a lot more incidents targeting the Jewish residents of Crown Heights, and I have yet to hear of Jewish residents creating a riot. We recognize that the instigators are a small number of young, uninspired individuals, and we do not blame the entire community for the actions of a few, rather we must condemn the actions of the few, and demand that their community condemn their actions as well, which I have not seen or heard as a response to the many actions that have been a constant hazard of living in crown heights. Unfortunately, their silence is deafening.
CH Resident
Yidden are beaten every other day. One Shvartzah is beaten and all this tumult????
moishe der goilam
well at least he metioned the other incident
but you should also post the writeres email address it is in the daily news
so we can ask him if he checked the police files and saw how many crimes were commited by jews against balcks in the last year and vica versa before he goes on his rage
that is why we need to make sure every incident is reported and documented
Cee
Amazing. We are mugged, harassed and beaten daily and weekly for years and thats just normal. One black kid gets “attacked” and were on the verge of another riot??
Rachmana Litzlon, Ad Masai, we need Moshiach.
Levi
I dont know if you guys read the article but the kids father is a COP obviously his father will sure to make a big deal.
Time to post the facts
I think you should post on the website all the crimes that were committed the past 2-3 years in CH – seeing is believing – if you were to do that I think a lot of people out there would quickly change there minds!
Lucid and Coherent
This is a classic case of “dog bites man = not news“ but when ”man bites dog = that becomes big news” like in our case.
But lets all take a moment and give a thanks to SHMIRA (not to be confused with Shomrim) for raising the racial tension and making Crown Heights very much MORE unsafe and bring up the racial tensions even more!
awacs
my email to the writer:
I should think, before you write article like this, that you
should do a little basic research: go to the 71/77 pct crime
files. Count the Black-against-Jew assaults. Then count the
Jew-against-Black assaults (hint: you’ll be hard-pressed to
find a second one).
*One* black kid get beat up (after starting a fight and throwing
stones, mind you) after *years* of Jews getting beat, just because
they are Jewish and white, and *now* you’re full of indignation?
Where where you on the holiday, when the police blatantly ignored
an assault against a Jew:
http://www.crownheights.inf…
(oh, yeah: just a Jew, not a policeman’s son? Spike it.)
And where were you when a Shomrim member got himself arrested
for having the UNMITIGATED GALL to ask a NYPD lowlife to arrest
a black assailant? (Oh, sure: it was only a Jew that got mugged.
Never mind.)
But when a Jew hits a black (‘man-bites-dog’), why the, we must
spring into action! We must prevent a riot! Because, er, that’s
different, that’s why! To the barricades!
What … utter … crap.
CM
Yodayim yedei Eisov.
That said, Jewish kids are beaten every other week and nobody says anything.
Not Yossi S
The problem is that a few nuts from the Jewish community made the “exception” to the norm a problem. Allegedly some of the Shmira people are not balanced and may have gone overboard with the attack on the black man.
We need to bring the volunteer citizen patrols up to a level where society can accept them. At this pointm the NYPD thinks Shmira goes too far beyond their mandate, they need to be reigned in.
Unfortunately, what one alleged shmira member did makes the entire community look bad.
Resident
The sad thing is that people like Rubashkin, the Beis Din, and the others who “run” this neighborhood are too busy fighting with each other to even pay attention to this issue.
I guess there is anarchy in Crown Heights
Feeling safe
I noticed the increased presents of police in our community over the past week.
Now I see what causes the city to send cops to our community, a black man getting beaten up. Jews get beaten up every day and nothing, one black man gets whats coming to him for throwing a rock at a car and cops are crawling all over the place.
I guess we now know what gets a few cops on the street before our holiday to protect our kids from the black thugs that roam the streets.
The troubles began on April 14,
How on earth did this newspaper have the
audacity to say that the troubles started on April 14.
Just look around are area how many kids in the neighborhood where not mugged or attempted mugging or their bikes stolen etc…
how many peaple had their cars broken in to or their tires slashed mirrors stolen
etc…
or the incident of Ephraim Klein
and there going to say tension started on april 14
penname
Let it be because of ‘man biting dog’,
But if that’s the only way to get the police onto the street…
Mission Accomplished!
out-of-towner
nobody here has said that what those jews did was wrong.
it’s wrong that there’s constant attacks against jews in CH. and it’s wrong that those 2 jewish kids beat up on a black kid.
you expect the schvartzes in CH to act like bahaimas. for jews to act like that, i’m disgusted.
Fight back
I think it’s very appropriate that a police officer’s son got hit. Our neighbors systematically dehumanize, bully and abuse us. This is no exaggeration; rather it is something that most people have not yet realized.
Much of their behavior stems from the churches that preach hatred against us. It stems from the black subculture of gangster rap and the glorification of gang violence and murder. It stems from our neighbors inability to teach their children respect.
The police have taken a very cavalier attitude to our concerns. They pay us nothing more than lip service and they have no respect for us. We donโt need their respect. What we need is to take the initiative and punish those that bully us.
yudi gerevitch (8th grade ot)
i heard the black kid was throwing stones at jewish kids before he got beaten up so let this kid keep his mouth shut and not try to make a big deal and blame the jews!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stop the hate
Those terrible Shmira thugs that beat up poor innocent shfartzers who just happened to be throwing rocks at Jews, and BH the Cops remember how to investigate things.
I am sure they have arrested all sorts of shfartzers for the beating of Shmuly Bolkeny.
boruch ben Tzvi(A H)hakohaine hoffinger
B”H
The Daily News Op Ed makes sense considering the fact that it appears like Andrew Charles’s rock-throwing is unknown to them.
If this Andrew Charles is honest he won’t balk at one or two lie-detector tests. He should be asked it he started the quarrel and fight by throwing stones.
You-ve got to be kidding
Unbelievable
When will enough be enough in this community?
Get up and go en masse to the Precinct
now before it’s too late.
Or is it too late already.
See you at the progrom..eh I mean the riot.
ER
I think some one should get a list of all the attacks on jews and bring it to one of these meetings and send a copy to bloomberg and the news. It would really be an eye opener for the velt to see that the cops here are bias and crooked.
Rational
Do you know what the biggest issue is here? Racism. And I’m talking to us, Lubavitchers.
No one wants to take the blame. ‘It wasn’t us – it was them… they’ve done it more then us.’ Basically, we sound like irresponsible toddlers. And until we start to take responsability of ourselves guess what? It aint gonna change.
Firstly we can start educating ourselves to think maturely about other cultures. Some of the above comments are pathetic! There is the underlying inference that black people are ‘favoured’ – this is despite the fact that the majority of them are working class citizens. There is the inference that ‘black’ people are bad and rob and steal and do whatever else, yes of course some do, but this does not pertain to ALL African Americans.
Stop being so closeminded! Stop teaching your children that all black people should be feared! The majority of them just want to go on with their daily lives.
Unfortunately, there has been a spate of attackings and this should definitely not be ignored. The attackers should definitely be apprehended be them black or Lubavitch.
But saying that the one Lubavitch boy should not be punished is unacceptable. No matter how many blacks have attacked Lubavitchers, letting him go sends a negative message to all our youngsters. How can we let any of our boys attack others, no matter who they be?
So lets start looking deeper at ourselves and our attitudes. There is justice in all of this, and an end in sight if we start looking at all people, no matter who they be, favourably.
Mike
Rational read , read ,read, throwing stones is acceptable!????!!!!Why is no one focusing on the provocation!!!
Make it clear stones were being thrown first!
The DN lays the Balkany beating on his statement????“Balkany Says””
YAnkel ben Menachem Mendel
I agree with the previous comment . We should know better right is right and wrong is wrong.What has happened before does not give anyone the right to abuse anyone!We I am talking about the Jewish Community We know one can only be judged on an individual basis certainly not collectively. There is no Justice for anyone!
boucher from O.T. 73----76
like other posts have said lets bring all the cases out and see who does the crime in our hood..
Re: rational
Re rational – you obviously don’t live in CH ’cause if you did you would reconsider writing your comment- when boys, girls, men and women come home every other week -if not every week, IF NOT EVERY DAY! beaten up, bullied and robbed by blacks and then one black is beaten up (what ever the true story is – IF he was innocent then it’s totally unjustified and his attackers should be punished) it hurts and eats one up when one sees how the media/the blacks have the audacity to blow up such a story – A CHUTPAH BLI TAGO! Stop being so politically “open-minded” correct!
Shmuel
CH.info: I’d like to chime in with sevral others and request that you compile a list of several years worth of attacks and shootings etc. to contrast it with this contrived case.
It is important as a backdrop before entering into any discussions on the issue.
Unique perspective
I do not know if it has been mentioned but leaders of both communities should get together and work towards a multi racial/ cultural community watch. We might be percieved as easier targets and are targeted for racial reasons but the negative elements in CH are a threat to everyone.
well that is to say IF...
does the other side have community leaders??!!
Aaron
I have a few questions…if it’s wrong for crimes to be committed against Jews then why is it ok for the Jews to retaliate? In my understanding, a crime is a crime regardless of the ethnicity, religion, creed etc. of the assailant. Secondly, if someone disparages a Jew are they automatically an anti-Semitic hate monger? If so, then all of you who’ve used racial slurs go take a look in the mirror. Every one of you has shown yourselves to be nothing more than close minded bigots. Lastly, what have YOU done to combat the crime in your community? Martin Niemoller’s words are as true today as they were when they were first spoken. Where is your outrage when other people are treated unfairly by the NYPD? Where is your righteous indignation when the police shoot and kill unarmed men in the street? This is more than just a racial issue. This issue speaks to the apathy and bigotry that is rampant not only in CH but in America.