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Rebuilding black-Jewish relations

Rabbi Eli Cohen, right, talks with a census volunteer at #OneCrownHeights festival, Sept. 15, 2019.

NEW YORK— At the end of August, the New York Police Dept. hate crimes task force investigated an alleged anti-Semitic attack near Brower Park in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Someone had allegedly thrown a block of ice at a chasidic man driving a car. It was the second allegedly anti-Semitic attack that week, coming days after an assailant had bashed a chasidic man’s head with a brick.

Two weeks later, at the same park, the neighborhood projected a different image: one of a diverse and peaceful community.

At a community festival on Sunday, Sept. 15, a popular Orthodox Jewish children’s singer shared the stage with a Caribbean dance group on stilts. Jewish and African-American children played together on a closed-off street. Inside a tent behind the stage, attendees sat in a circle and discussed contentious issues like hate crimes and gun violence.


Crown Heights, a majority African-American neighborhood with a sizable chasidic Jewish community and a growing population of hipsters, was the site of some of those attacks.

The violence has sparked painful memories of the 1991 riots there, which began when a black boy was killed accidentally by a car escorting Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late head of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement headquartered in the neighborhood.


“When you have very diverse communities coming from very different cultures living in one environment, we can’t simply think that living together, everything is going to be harmonious,” Laurie Cumbo, the New York City Council majority leader who represents Crown Heights, told JTA. “It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to live in a diverse community.”









Still, some people at the event raised festering issues.





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