Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights, by Matthew Shaer. John Wiley Press, 2012. 243pp.
By David Strom
SAN DIEGO — On December 29, 2007, the Crown Heights Shomrim (Hebrew for guards) Rescue Patrol answered a call for help from the Lubavitcher yeshivah student dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York. By answering that call, the Shomrim walked into what they later viewed as a trap. They were caught off guard by the mischistizn.
In 1994, Mendel Menachem Schneerson, the Seventh Rebbe of the Lubavitch dynasty, died. Generally speaking when a rebbe of a court died, a successor was chosen rather quickly to avoid infighting. In the case of Schneerson’s death, an eighth Lubavitcher rebbe has yet to be chosen. And, of course, that led to what was/is continuing factional wrangling.
Those that believe that their rebbe Mendel Menachem Schneerson was the Messiah are called mischistizn. They believe it is their duty to spread the word of the Messiah’s arrival. Moderate Lubavitchers (it is difficult to call any Lubavitch sect moderate) however, worried “that if the mischistizn came to dominate the Lubavitch movement, it might scare away prospective converts.” This schism extended into the heart of the Crown Heights Lubavitch community and the fracas at the yeshivah dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway.
All Lubavitchers, in some sense, are messianists. Those that believed that Mendel Menachem Schneerson was the Messiah were the majority of the students living in the Lubavitch residential dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway. A minority of the students studying to become rabbis did not think he was. Thus, they were in constant conflict with the mischistizn. Arguments and sometimes fights would erupt among the rabbinical students: However, most of the disruptions remained “in house.” This particular squabble turned into a brawl that did not remain within the tight Lubavitch community.
Joshua Gur, a rabbinical student, living at the yeshivah dormitory could hear the argument taking place just a few doors down from his room on the first floor of the dormitory. He felt fairly certain he knew what the argument was about. Down the hall a feud had been taking place between the two bochurim (boys) over whether or not the messiah had arrived.
Gur left his room and pushed his way through the gathering crowd of students milling around the room of the fight. He thrust his way into room 107 where the clash was taking place. It appeared to him that the scuffle was over. As he turned to leave, he ran into two men wearing dark-blue police uniforms. The Shomrim had arrived.
Gur said to them, “This is not your problem.”
Shomrim responded, “We’re just trying to get things under control.”
Gur replied, “There’s nothing to get under control. It’s over.”
But it wasn’t.
For Schneur Rotem an Israeli student who spoke very little English, it was just beginning. One of the Shomrim smacked Rotem in the face as he lost his glasses. Rotem slipped to the wet floor, balled himself into a fetal position and did the best he could to ward off the kicks to his legs. He remembered “more than one person doing the kicking.” He was kicked in his ribs and in the head. He claimed to have been “punched and threatened.”
From the view of the Shomrim they were defending themselves. “The punches thrown, the taunts exchanged, the way the riled-up bochurim had surrounded the Shomrim, closing in from every side until the Shomrim guys had crawled up on the beds to get away from the scrum.” When they saw Paul Huebner, a local Lubavitch lawyer, accompanying the bochurim to the hospital, they felt they had been “set-up.” The Shomrim were the target.
None of the resident students were arrested or charged except for the six Crown Heights Rescue Patrol. The Hasidic settlement in Crown Heights, “even at its most dense accounted for only 30 percent of the neighborhood population.” And now, the volunteer guardians, a freelance anticrime organization of the Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights, needed rescuing from the New York City court system that was charging six of them with committing misdemeanor and/or possibly felonies.
In this small closed Hasidic community there existed two volunteer defense groups, the Shomrim and the Shimira. They were at first in the same group, but now they were a house divided and “at war” with one another. Former friends now hurled insults at each other, each vied for community support, and by 2008, the feud was a decade old and “No resolution was in sight.”
Or so it seemed. Maybe the arrest and conviction of the Shomrim Six could end the feuding between the two guardian groups.
For the greater Crown Heights black community the Shomrim were disliked and viewed as vigilantes or just plain Jewish racist thugs. Anthropologist, Henry Goldschmidt in his book Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights wrote, “that blacks have long split on whether the political clout of the Hasidim represented an attack on their neighborhood’s black majority, a model community empowerment to emulate, or both.”
Many blacks, especially young ones, “reported being stopped and asked for identification; several men said they had been collared and shoved into the back of a squad car, for no discernible reason other than the fact that they were black.” In 1986, four young Hasidim, “were arrested for beating a black teenager with a hammer, a hose and a baseball bat.” The victim escaped and identified his assailants. The Brooklyn District Attorney called the attack “a racially motivated crime.”
A black resident of the community, bitter over the fact that “Hasidim were attempting to snatch up all real estate, immediately surrounding Kingston Avenue” told the New York Times “They have to accept the fact that we are here. They have to respect our beliefs, just as we are bound to accept theirs.”
New York City and in particular the NYPD tried desperately to lower the activity of the Hasidic anti-crime patrols in Crown Heights. If this “so called” assault at the Lubavitch dormitory could be used to diminish the authority of the Shomrim, they would use it. Gang violence is not to be tolerated in New York City, “no matter whether the perpetrators are black, white, Hispanic, or Hasidic.” However, by arresting on the Shomrim Six, the city may have bet on the wrong horse.
The struggle between the different levels of Lubavitch messianists continued. Paul Huebner, the Lubavitch lawyer for the yeshiva students who filed a multi-million dollar criminal lawsuit against the Shomrim Six, was a Shimira advocate. Huebner thought he may have found a way to diminish or eliminate completely the power of the Shomrim. He would use the assault as a wedge to put the Shomrim out of business.
As time passed, the government’s case against the Shomrim Six seemed to grow weaker and weaker. The DA repeatedly “offered the defendants a deal: misdemeanor assault instead of felony gang assault, a sentence of probation, and maybe some anger management classes.” All refused. The Shomrim wanted to return as vindicated men. For them, it was a matter of pride. Chaim Hershkop, one of the Shomrim Six, “believed that it would be better to go to prison with his head held high than it would be to utter a false confession for something he never did.”
By November or early December 2009, nearly two years after the alleged assault by the Shomrim Six at the yeshiva had taken place, the trial was nearing completion. Joyce David, an orthodox Jewish lawyer for the defense, questioned yeshiva student Schneur Rotem under oath at the Shomrim Six trial.
Defense lawyer asked Rotem, “So I’m asking you if you’re a passive person.”
“Yes.”
“You never would use your fist to defend yourself, would you?”
“I try not to,” Rotem replied.
A little later David continued her questioning of Rotem. She established that Rotem in the ambulance on the way to the hospital spoke to the EMTs. “Isn’t it a fact,” David said, “that you told them you were involved in a fist fight?”
“It’s possible. I don’t remember what I said.”
“Isn’t it a fact that you complained of pain to your left hand from the fight?”
“Yes, I complained about pain in my left hand.”
At the hospital, Rotem basically repeats the same story to the emergency room nurses and doctors. The emergency personnel determined that Rotem had a fracture and put his hand in a cast.
In the courtroom David questioned Rotem “the hospital put a cast on your hand, right?”
“Correct,” Rotem murmured.
“Did they ask you if you got the injury by punching someone?”
“I don’t recall such a…I don’t recall.”
“You don’t recall them telling you that this is called a boxer’s fracture?”
The flimsy case against the Shomrim Six virtually melted away after the testimony of Schneur Rotem. “Schneur Rotem, once alleged victim and now apparent assailant.”
After nearly two months of the trial it did not take the jury long to find five of the Shomrim Six innocent of all charges. There was only one conviction.” No jail time for anyone and a misdemeanor fine for one of them.
The Lubavitch approach to messianism played an important role in the fight between the yeshiva bochurim and the Shomrim. Dr. Norman Lamm the president of Yeshivah University in the 1990’s and the premier orthodox smicha granting yeshiva in the United States explained:
“If [Lubavichers] believe the Rebbe could have been the Moshiach, fine I agree.” However he stressed: Many people could have been the Moshiach, and he had a far better chance than most. But to say he’s the Moshiach after he died? The whole polemic we’ve had with Christianity for two thousand years is that we say a Moshiach who did not accomplish world peace, who did not accomplish the redemption of Israel and the world, is not the Moshiach. And here we’re told that [the Rebbe] can be. If that’s the case, why were we so reluctant to accept Jesus?
For this reader and reviewer Matthew Shaer’s book raised a theological question that should be answered by the religious Jewish community. If orthodox rabbi Norman Lamm is correct, should Jews who believe the Lubavitch Rebbe was or is the Moshiach be allowed to stay within the religious Jewish world? After all, historically speaking, haven’t groups of Jews been ex-communicated for following a false messiah?
Shaer’s book is worth reading.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com