Neighbors in Different Worlds
History has often portrayed Crown Heights as a neighborhood where Black and Jewish residents lived peacefully, but it was much more complicated than that.
The population shifted from mostly Jewish in the early 1960s, including a relatively small number of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, to mostly African American and Caribbean by the early 1970s, Goldschmidt tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
“Black residents felt they were being pushed out” as new Jewish residents arrived, which fueled tension, Taylor says. Black residents considered this part of an ongoing pattern of racialized neighborhood control in New York City.
“There were always Black and Jewish community leaders that had professional relationships with each other, and there were always financial ties among neighbors,” Goldschmidt says, “but there were very little social interactions or communal ties.”
The groups lived together but in separate social, religious and political worlds. They attended different schools, churches and synagogues. They were living side by side, but in different worlds, Goldschmidt says.
By 1991, Crown Heights was one of New York City's most diverse neighborhoods, and included African Americans, as well as immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and other Caribbean nations, living among a large group of Lubavitch Hasidic Jews.
But Black residents felt the New York City government favored the Jewish neighbors in community policies, while the Hasidic community was concerned about antisemitic and violent crimes.
The Riots
In the hours after the crash that killed Gavin, word spread about his death. Soon, a large crowd of mostly Black teenagers gathered at the scene and began throwing bottles, taunting Jewish neighbors, setting fire to homes and damaging property. Some even shouted, “Get the Jews!”
Several blocks away, Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish graduate student in New York, was caught up in the violence. He was surrounded by a mob, beaten and stabbed multiple times. He died at the hospital a few hours later, but before he did, he identified 16-year-old Lemrick Nelson as his attacker.
“Yankel Rosenbaum had absolutely nothing [to do with] the death of Gavin Cato,” Goldschmidt says.
For four days, Crown Heights erupted in violence. Mobs attacked Jewish residents, homes and businesses, and clashed with police. More than 150 police officers were injured, and many people were arrested. Events were made worse when Rev. Al Sharpton told those at Gavin’s funeral that Hasidic Jews “don’t want peace.”
2 Deaths, 2 Narratives
In the immediate aftermath, Black residents saw Gavin as the main victim, and the events of that night represented their frustrations boiling over from decades of perceived inequality.
In the eyes of many Black Crown Heights residents, “an irresponsible driver ran a red light and slammed into two Black children, and a callous private ambulance left these children to die while whisking the driver from the scene,” Goldschmidt wrote in his book. This racially charged view, he explains, sparked the violence that night. To many Black Crown Heights residents, the Lubavitch Hasidim Jews were just the latest group of white people wielding power over them.
Jewish residents, however, considered the response of their Black neighbors, especially the murder of Rosenbaum, as an antisemitic attack. They saw the violence “as a ‘pogrom’ triggered by baseless hostility toward Jews,” Goldschmidt wrote.
He explains to A&E that the Jewish community viewed the attacks as a “mob out to get Jews" that “triggered historical trauma” for “an Orthodox Jewish community that had fled the Holocaust a few decades before.”
Others blamed the violence on the failure of city officials—particularly Mayor David Dinkins, New York City's first Black mayor, who was elected during an already volatile racial climate, and the New York City Police Department. “Dinkins did nothing intentional, as some accused him of doing,” Taylor says, explicitly rejecting the idea that anybody carried out a pogrom.
But the 1993 Report to the Governor on the Disturbances in Crown Heights (known as the Girgenti Report) criticized the NYPD and Dinkins’ responses. The report found the NYPD didn’t control the roaming mobs, and police relied instead on passive crowd-control, which prevented them from restoring order.
The legal cases that followed only further exposed the complexity of the neighborhood. A Brooklyn grand jury failed to indict Yosef Lifsh, the Hasidic man who hit and killed Gavin, because it found no criminal wrongdoing, devastating Black residents.
Nelson, however, was charged on August 10, 1994, with second-degree murder for killing Rosenbaum. Nelson’s lawyers didn’t deny he had stabbed Rosenbaum, but they claimed the killing had nothing to do with Rosenbaum’s religion. Nelson was acquitted on July 25, 1996, after a six-week trial, outraging New York's Jewish community. He eventually was found guilty in a Brooklyn federal court in 2003 of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights, but not for causing his death. Nelson was sentenced to the maximum of 10 years, and was released June 2, 2004, on time served.
Mayor Dinkins eventually lost his bid for reelection in 1993 to Rudy Giuliani, who five years later settled a federal lawsuit against the city for $1.1 million by members of Rosenbaum’s family, the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council and residents of Crown Heights. Giuliani also issued a formal apology for the city’s inadequate police protection at the time.
In the final days of Giuliani’s term in 2002, the city settled another lawsuit, this time for $400,000 with Gavin’s family, that claimed the EMS didn’t do enough to treat the 7-year-old after the accident.
