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Jewish Week

Rev. Al Sharpton will be among the panelists at a forum on black-Jewish relations 20 years after Crown Heights Sunday night at the Hampton Synagogue.

Sharpton to Discuss CH Riots at Hampton Synagogue

Jewish Week

Rev. Al Sharpton will be among the panelists at a forum on black-Jewish relations 20 years after Crown Heights Sunday night at the Hampton Synagogue.

The controversial National Action Network activist will discuss the topic with Bob Kaplan of the Jewish Community Relations Council, City Councilwoman Letitia James of Crown Heights and the Westhampton congregation’s rabbi, Marc Schneier, who is founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

The program falls just two days after the 20th anniversary of the start of three days of violence against Jews in the chasidic community that followed the death of a black child, Gavin Cato, who was struck by a car in the Lubavitcher rebbe’s motorcade. Yankel Rosenbaum, a scholar visiting the neighborhood from Australia, was murdered by a mob in the first hours of the riot.

Many residents of Crown Heights as well as leaders of major Jewish organizations fault Rev. Sharpton, who entered the neighborhood after the murder, for further agitating the situation with marches and fiery rhetoric rather than calling for the restoration of calm.

As a result, most Jewish organizations have refused to have any official contact with Sharpton, calling on him to apologize for his behavior during that events and four years later when street protests against a Harlem Jewish merchant culminated in a shooting and arson spree that left eight people dead.

Sharpton, however, has accepted opportunities to discuss his role, such as a 2001 debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and several interviews with The Jewish Week.

One politically conservative member of the Hampton Synagogue, Jeff Wiesenfeld, said he did not oppose the appearance, but if he attended would try to ask at least one pointed question of Sharpton.

“There are two loose ends he has to address,” said Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York who last May started an imbroglio when he tried to block John Jay College from bestowing an honorary degree on Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner because of Kushner’s criticism of Israel.

Wiesenfeld said he wants to ask about Rev. Sharpton’s defamation of former Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones related to the 1989 Tawana Brawley rape accusation, and his use of the term “diamond merchants” during Cato’s funeral, widely taken by Jews as an inflammatory reference that deepened the sociological divide that fueled the riots.

“I’ll be eager to press him on those questions,” said Wiesenfeld, though he said his need to return home to Great Neck to prepare for work the next day may preclude his attendance. Wiesenfeld is a manager at Bernstein Global Wealth Management.

The panel will be moderated by Hampton Synagogue congregant Joel Cohen, an attorney at the law firm Stroock, Stroock and Lavan.

Asked what kind of reception, he expected for Sharpton, Rabbi Schneier said Monday, “No clue, seriously. I can’t predict this one. I know there is curiosity, intrigue, excitement and dissention.”

He noted that the Orthodox congregation — which has made national headlines with its attempt to build an eruv allowing Sabbath observers to carry on Saturday within a set area — has hosted controversial conservative cable commentator Glenn Beck last weekend, and in mid-July Imam Faisal Rauf, cleric of the planned Manhattan Islamic community center that critics call the Ground Zero Mosque.

“As a rabbi I am not here to impose, but rather expose,” he said, referring to the thought-provoking forums.

Political figures such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Republican Jew in Congress, has also visited, and GOP presidential contender John Huntsman will appear at the Hampton Synagogue later this summer.

Asked his own opinion of Rev. Sharpton, Rabbi Schneier said that many in the Jewish community do not recognize that the activist has severely moderated his tone in the decades since the events in Crown Heights.

“They freeze on where he was 20 years ago,” he said. “People do evolve and grow. These are the topics that are going to be discussed. It’s going to be a watershed event.”

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28 Comments

  • chr

    gosh, forgive if i dont remember, but isn’t there evidence that he is partly to blame for the riots. what a shunder.

  • fed up in CH

    i think it’s wrong to give any attention to that poor excuse for a human being.

    reverend???? oichet mir a REVEREND!!!

  • heard him already

    I would pack some earplugs…he ends up shouting a lot and nothing really ends up being said.

  • said by a cheights resident

    “Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica.”

  • Declasse Intellectual

    Not only is Sharpton part of the problem, but he has been the problem for years and because of people like him there will be no solution.

  • this if from wikipedia

    “In 1963, Sharpton’s father left his wife to have a relationship with Sharpton’s half-sister.”

    its from wikipedia if you dont believe me check for yourself
    this shows what a mamzer he was born to

  • Outraged at the attention he gets

    read d, eliezrie’s article where he calls it what is was – a POGROM, incited by
    this poor excuse for a human being.

  • Milhouse

    Marc Schneier’s personal life is a disgrace to the title “rav umoreh horo’oh beyisroel”. And now he has the chutzpah to invite this antisemite to talk in a shul, and gives him the honour of the title “reverend”! Would he invite Charles Manson or David Duke?

  • And of course he won-t skew a thing!

    This seems like an attempt to validate Sharpton. I agree with the previous question. Why is there no one directly involved wih the riots on the panel?

  • Wow!

    Wow! Look at all the lashon hara in these comments! Have we learned nothing from the Baal Shem Tov? Where’s the emunah? Where’s the chesed? Where’s the teshuvah?

    How many more holy sacrifices will we have to pay to prevent whatever catastrophes that the accusing forces are demanding?

  • Chaim

    I think Sharpton is the type of guy that does the worst damage to African Americans, cause he accomplishes absolutley nothing for them, however he can be bought easily so Fox news brings him on all the time he will say anything they want him to say ( plus he lives the attention ) and politicians as well Shmeer him a few bucks and get the black vote, based on his say.

    Then there is the criminal aspect of him, he has said things many times that were very questionable legally, if I were o say them I would have bin arrested, amd he gets away with it, caus the DA is cared of him, he should ne called for what he is, a low class thug!!!!!!!

  • Feh

    I think #19 was penned either by Sharpton or a self-haating Jew.
    The guy’s a pig. He is a rabble rouser. Not only did he make the riots wose here, but he has instigated so much hate and pain all over the city whenever one of his “BROTHERS” was hurt. Didn’t come out screaming when precious Leiby was murdered. Now if Leiby was BLACK you know you would have heard “dull-ton”. It’s time he roasts in Hell already.

  • moshe ben amram

    very surprised after 23 comments no one had the simple idea of calling the synagogue and telling them what u think?! and maybe jamming their phone lines…

    631.288.0534

    Rabbis ExT: :

  • 19 to 21

    21, everything counts! Would you call the story about the Baal Shem Tov and the martyrs of Pavlitch nonesense?

    Everything we say and do counts!

    Aren’t we obligated to destroy Amalek? How do we accomplish this? We’re not called to kill the Goyim, but rather to help them destroy the hold that their inner-Amalek has on them. And this goes double for our own inner-Amalek! You can’t do that by throwing gas on the fire and fanning the flames of hatred and strife.

    And didn’t the Baal Shem Tov teach us that the reason we’re moved to speak evil against others is because we recognize in them our own shortcomings? Please, read my response to 23, if it’s approved.

  • 19 to 23 Feh

    23, I’m not Sharpton nor a self-hating Yid. Remember the debate that the Misnagid had with the Besht in Medsibuz?

    The Baal Shem Tov says like this, “Many religious people think that only certain special places are sanctified, but those with a deeper understanding realize that all places are holy. They know that not only prophecies and visions come from Heaven, but every spoken word is a message from HaShem, and that by reflection a person can find in it a divine purpose and intention. Someone on this spiritual level can see mountains of meanings even in events that appear trivial to others.

    To holy people who’ve grasped this secret, that everything is holy, it’s not important whether they pray in a synagogue or in a forest. When they are meditating in d’vekut with the Creator of the world, blessed be He, they see no difference between words of Torah and the offhand remarks and idle converstion of anyone on the street. Although the speaker may be unaware of the significance of his own words, that doesn’t contradict the fact that the One Who gave man a mouth and the ability to speak has put in his mouth the words he utters, and they can have many meanings.

    Holy people in a state of d’vekut hear only the divine inner voice; and they become so attuned that, even when they fall from their d’vekut, they will hear in others’ speech only the inner voice arousing them to return to their divine service. A person on the highest level of emunah sees no difference between studying holy books and reflecting on the words of a child or a Goy, or on a thought that entered his mind and was slow to leave – to him they’re all words of Torah. If he sees that a thought about worldly matters, or one that comes from his yetzer hara or lust, keeps returning to his mind – he takes it as a heavenly sign.”

    Please, read my response to 21, if it’s approved.

  • a crown heights resident

    It’s like inviting hitler yimach sumo to talk about the holicost