The Rev. Al Sharpton, the radical black activist from New York, paid a four-hour visit to Israel on the eve of Yom Kippur and failed in his attempt to serve court papers on a Lubavitcher Hasid.
Sharpton, representing the family of a black child accidentally killed by the Lubavitcher’s car, ended his whirlwind trip Tuesday by scrambling to leave Israel before its airport shut down for the Day of Atonement.
He landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on Tuesday morning and was back at the airport for the noon flight to Frankfurt.
Sharpton was unable to locate the driver, Yosef Lifsh, whose car struck and killed 7-year-old Gavin Cato in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on Aug. 19.
The incident triggered racial violence in the ethnically diverse neighborhood, which culminated in the fatal stabbing of Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Hasidic student from Australia.
Immediately after a grand jury found no basis for charging Lifsh in the child’s death, the 22-year-old Hasid left the United States, reported by some to have gone to Israel.
But Israeli officials denied he was in the country. Some American news reports speculated he may have gone to Canada.
Sharpton, accompanied by attorney and fellow activist Alton Maddox, said he intended to serve Lifsh with a summons from the Brooklyn Supreme Court ordering him to appear Friday for pretrial depositions in a $100 million civil lawsuit brought by the Cato family.
Unable to find Lifsh, Sharpton presented the summons to U.S. Embassy officials here. He said the officials advised him of the avenues open to prosecute Lifsh under the U.S.-Israeli extradition treaty. They told him, however, that the treaty does not provide extradition for civil proceedings.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
