Among Righteous Men

Matthew Shaer

Description

Inside the hidden world of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn's Crown Heights--a close-knit but divided community.

On a cold night in December, the members of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol called the Shomrim are summoned to a yeshiva dormitory in Crown Heights. There to break up a brawl, the Shomrim instead find themselves embroiled in a religious schism which has split the community and turned roommate against roommate, neighbor against neighbor. At the center of the storm is Aron Hershkop, the owner of an auto-repair business and the leader of the Shomrim. Hershkop watches as the NYPD builds a criminal case against his brothers and friends, apparently with the help of several local residents, who have taken the rare step of forgoing a ruling from the local rabbinical council. Soon, both sides are squaring off in a Brooklyn criminal court, with the Shomrim facing gang assault charges and decades in prison. What conflict could run so deep it left both sides airing their dirty laundry so publicly? This compelling story takes you to the deepest corners of a normally hidden world.

• Features fast-paced writing and a true story with surprising twists, personal conflicts, and a tense trial
• Offers a glimpse in a normally sheltered and private community many see, but few know much about.
• Centers on an unusual man facing a universal conflict: do you do what’s simple and expedient, or do you do follow our heart, your tradition, and your faith?

Author’s Note xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 7

Chapter 2 21

Chapter 3 35

Chapter 4 45

Chapter 5 61

Chapter 6 75

Chapter 7 85

Chapter 8 101

Chapter 9 113

Chapter 10 125

Chapter 11 137

Chapter 12 157

Chapter 13 171

Chapter 14 187

Chapter 15 193

Chapter 16 201

Chapter 17 209

Chapter 18 223

Epilogue 229

Acknowledgments 233

Index 235

Sujets

• Middle Atlantic
• Histoire
• Brooklyn NY
• Nueva York
• Shomrim
• Crown Heights, Brooklyn
• Jewish history
• State
• Hasidic Judaism
• Crown Heights
• United States
• History
• Local
• New York

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118095201
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index

Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Shaer. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shaer, Matthew, date, Among righteous men : a tale of vigilantes and vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights / Matthew Shaer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-60827-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-09519-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-09520-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-09521-8 (ebk) 1. Jews–New York (State)–New York–Social conditions–21st century. 2. Hershkop, Aron–Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Vigilantes–New York (State)–New York. 4. Habad–Social aspects–New York (State)–New York. 5. Crown Heights (New York, N. Y.)–Social conditions–21st century. I. Title. F129.B7S53 2012 974.70492′4–dc23 2011028934
For my mom, the first writer I ever knew
“… and who would venture to come between two righteous men?”
—Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim
Author’s Note
This account is based on a range of police and court documentation, hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of sources, and months of firsthand reporting. Still, the events described herein are extremely controversial, and although I have sought at every juncture to corroborate the often conflicting memories of the participants, I was sometimes forced to fall back on my own best judgment in assembling the narrative. Most of the dialogue comes directly from trial testimony; elsewhere, it was recreated from the recollections of the involved parties. Some proper names have been changed.
Introduction
In the winter of 2009, I spent several weeks in a harshly lit Brooklyn courtroom, watching the trial of six Lubavitcher Jews, who had been charged by the district attorney with felony gang assault, along with a string of lesser charges, some of them weapons-related. All six defendants were members of a vigilante group called the Crown Heights Shomrim Rescue Patrol; if convicted, each man faced a long spell in federal prison.
The Hasidic community has a storied history of civilian anticrime efforts. There are Shomrim almost everywhere there are large concentrations of Hasidim: in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in Stamford Hill in London, and in Melbourne, Australia. The Shomrim, which means “guards” in Hebrew, function a little like an auxiliary police force. The members, all volunteers, fix tires, help direct traffic, and escort elderly residents to and from the bus stop. They are also regularly involved in more athletic endeavors, such as chasing down purse-snatchers or breaking up street fights.
I was fascinated by the kind of Jew the Shomrim represented: the Jew who fights back. I thought of the fabled Jewish gangsters of the Lower East Side—“Johnny” Levinsky, “Dopey Benny” Fein. These were brash and cunning men who found equality and respect in strength and insisted on their place in the world. I thought, too, of the Odessa stories of Isaak Babel, where an assortment of underbosses schemed their way through the district of Moldavanka. Babel, who was killed in 1940 by the Soviet secret police, took an obvious pride in his characters. He was proud of Benya Krik and Froim Grach, and their refusal to be complacent. He was proud that even at their lowliest, they still sought to shape the world to their liking. To bend fate to their will.
The Crown Heights Shomrim, of course, were not criminals. In fact, their stated role was to protect against criminality, to erect a human barrier between the Jewish settlement and the bustle of the world outside city limits. The organization—originally known as the Crown Heights Maccabees—was first pressed into service in the 1960s, when a growing ultra-Orthodox settlement was brought into direct conflict with a much larger black population. (That conflict peaked with the bloody race riots of 1991; Jews in Crown Heights continue to refer to the riots as a “pogrom.”) For the most part, the Shomrim were viewed by the city as a helpful community presence. Shomrim volunteers tracked down petty criminals and using a fleet of police vehicles—most of them purchased at city auctions—aided law enforcement in missing person searches.
Yet in fighting back—in their deliberate shows of strength—the Crown Heights Shomrim often came into direct conflict with the NYPD and the very community they were sworn to protect.
Almost two years earlier, the Crown Heights Shomrim had responded to a call about a disturbance at the yeshiva dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway, in the middle of Crown Heights. Witnesses later reported seeing six members punch, strangle, and kick their way through a crowd of rabbinical students. For their part, the Shomrim claimed to have been ambushed. A video taken by one of the students seemed to back up their account: on the tape, the Shomrim are trapped, hemmed in on all sides by a seething mass of black hats and coats. Still, the Brooklyn district attorney had spent months assembling a case against the Crown Heights Shomrim; meanwhile, the alleged victims had filed a civil suit against the members, seeking millions of dollars in damages.
For the Shomrim themselves, the trial was a particularly painful—and infuriating—experience. Lubavitchers, like all Hasidim, are often loath to sully themselves in a secular court, which they view as less than perfectly attuned to their interests. Under halacha, or Jewish law, any religious Jew should first attempt to settle his dispute through rabbinical arbitration. Yet the alleged victims had not filed first in a rabbinical court and had instead gone directly to the secular authorities. In the formulation of the Shomrim, the yeshiva students were mosers , or “rats,” who had intentionally flouted religious law—a crime once punishable by death.
As I would soon come to understand, the trial of the six Shomrim members reflected a deep and abiding turmoil on the streets of Crown Heights. Not only was a Jewish security patrol charged with gang assault—a historical rarity—but two groups of Lubavitchers were trading public accusations, in the process allowing outsiders a peek inside a normally closeted world. Although they had friends and supporters across Crown Heights, the members of the Shomrim felt that they had been hung out to dry—and they were angry that more people had not risen up to champion them.
A few decades earlier, the entire imbroglio might have been solved by a wave of the hand of the local rebbe, or Grand Rabbi—a man considered closer to God than other mortals.
In 1994, however, Mendel Menachem Schneerson, the Seventh Rebbe of the Lubavitch dynasty, suffered a stroke and died in his Brooklyn home, surrounded by family and aides. Because the rebbe is such a centrifugal force for a Hasidic community, a successor is usually appointed quickly, to avoid infighting or even the disintegration of an entire movement. Yet an eighth Lubavitcher rebbe has never been named. The reason is primarily eschatological: even before Schneerson’s death, a segment of the Lubavitch community had come to believe that their rebbe was the Messiah.
Technically, all Lubavitchers are messianists, in that they believe that a messianic age is imminent. After Schneerson’s death, though, the Lubavitch community quickly broke open along messianist lines. The mischistizn , as they are known in Crown Heights, announced that it was their duty to spread the word of the Messiah’s arrival. Moderate Lubavitchers, on the other hand, worried that if the mischistizn came to dominate the Lubavitch movement, it might scare away prospective converts. This religious