Human Rights Commission Probing Clash Between Jews, Other Minority Groups

Mrs. Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of New York City’s Human Rights Commission, is investigating a racial clash that occurred last Friday outside the Mosdoth Day Care Center which serves the Hasidic community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Mrs. Norton said she was “deeply disappointed and distressed that the dispute involving the day-care facility in the multi-racial, multiethnic community of Crown Heights had spilled over into an incident involving the use of blatantly anti-Semitic language.

An aide to Mrs. Norton told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that the Commissioner learned of the incident on Saturday but was not able to contact the rabbis and other leaders of the Hasidic community because of the Jewish Sabbath, but was contacting them today.

The clash occurred during a demonstration by some 30 Blacks, Puerto Ricans and whites who protested that the publicly financed facility admitted only Hasidic children. A conciliation meeting over the dispute, which has been simmering for some time, was going on inside the center when the demonstrators engaged in a shoving match with police guarding the premises.

ANTI-SEMITIC EPITHETS HURLED

At that point a rabbi reportedly went outside to talk to the demonstrators. He was met with shouts of “That’s why Hitler took care of you people,” and “They knew how to do it to you in Germany and that’s what we’re going to do to you here.” The rabbi was escorted back into the building by a reinforced squad of policemen.

Rabbi Shmuel M. Butman, director of the day care center which has an enrollment of 100 youngsters and receives federal and city funds to operate, said afterwards that admission was on a first-come-first-served basis. He said that the Mosdoth Center was one of only two among the 400 day care centers in the city that had a bi-lingual Yiddish-English program and that, therefore, Hasidic parents from all over Brooklyn registered their children first, filling up the places.

The demonstrators protested the alleged exclusion of all but Hasidic children. Several women who said they were Jewish but not Orthodox Joined in the demonstration. They left when the shoving and shouting started. Mrs. Norton said her Commission would begin immediately to contact the religious and political leaders in the area to attempt to resolve “the racial and ethnic aspects of the conflict.”