More than 20 members of the Jewish Defense Group (JDG) demonstrated Sunday in front of police headquarters in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, demanding greater police protection for the Hasidic Jews, in the racially mixed neighborhood.
According to Rabbi Yakov Lloyd, chairman of the JDG, members of his organization held the demonstration to express “outrage” over a march by some 300 Black residents of the area, held on Saturday, April 11. The Black protestors, who were chanting “No Justice, No Peace,” charged that two Hasidic Jews were involved in a firebombing February 26 of a Black woman’s house in the neighborhood. Tension between Blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights has increased as a result, with each group hurling accusations at the other.
According to Lloyd, who spoke at a press conference at the Chabad Lubavitch Center in Crown Heights prior to the demonstration at police headquarters, the accusation by the Blacks that two Hasidic Jews firebombed a Black woman’s house is “a distortion of reality and a big lie.”
He said that the Hasidic community in Crown Heights does not receive adequate police protection against “anti-Semitic incidents” committed by Blacks in the neighborhood. He called for the appointment of a special State Prosecutor to investigate the murder of two Hasidic Jews, in two separate incidents, last fall in Crown Heights. The two victims were Israel Rosen and Shlomo Fishman, both allegedly murdered by Blacks.
The JDG demonstrators Sunday were pelted with eggs thrown by Black youths, Lloyd told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He added, however, that during the 45-minute rally, there was heavy police protection and no other incidents took place. Crown Heights is a racially, ethnically mixed neighborhood where it is estimated that only 10 percent of some 40,000 members of the community are Jewish. The Lubavitcher Hasidim have lived in the neighborhood since the early 1940’s, when the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, came there from Europe.
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.
