CROWN HEIGHTS — An event billed as trying to bring the neighborhood together on the 25th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots has "desecrated" the memory of a man slain during the unrest, his family said.
The brother of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Jewish student fatally stabbed during the August 1991 conflict, described the One Crown Heights event as “an insult” to the memory of the 29-year-old Australian.
Speaking through a family representative, Norman Rosenbaum said the event — a day-long affair that will include a memorial service for the victims of the riots as well as a family-friendly “neighborhood festival” in Brower Park — is “shameful” and “a disgrace.”
“It is an insult to the memory of Yankel Rosenbaum, who was murdered in the early hours of the riots for being a Jew,” he said in a statement, adding that the riots “should never be forgotten” for what they truly were — “a pogrom.”
“The tragic loss of his life and the circumstances of his murder are today not worth more than games, music, festival rides, arts and crafts, live entertainment and non-kosher food,” he said.
Rosenbaum’s reaction to the commemorative event has come as a shock to its organizers, many of them longtime Crown Heights leaders like Devorah Halberstam, the founder of the Jewish Children’s Museum.
In the planning of Sunday’s event, she said she was “adamant” about including a memorial for all victims of the riots, including Yankel Rosenbaum and Gavin Cato, the 7-year-old boy killed by the car crash that sparked the violence.
“It was probably the saddest day I could remember that has ever happened to our community. Tragic and sad. And we have to remember it as such,” she said.
The two-hour memorial at the Jewish Children's Museum will be followed by a march to Brower Park and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, hosts of the neighborhood festival with Project CARE, a group founded shortly after the 1991 riots to promote tolerance in Crown Heights.
Stephanie Wilchfort, president of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, said Project CARE has been working for a year with careful consideration to plan Sunday’s anniversary event.
“The planning in itself is an extraordinary story of people with different perspectives coming together around a common purpose,” she said. “Brooklyn Children’s Museum honors the incredible work of our partners in realizing this day of reflection and neighborhood unity.”
Though the event will include lighthearted activities such as musical performances, jump-roping and free admission to the kid’s museum, the memory of the riots victims are the “absolute first concern” of organizers, Halberstam said. And she hopes Rosenbaum — a resident of Australia who is invited, along with the Cato family, to Sunday’s event — understands that.
“I hope that when he will see the memorial service where we will pay that absolutely greatest and deepest respect to his brother ... he’ll see it’s about the lives that were lost, both Yankel’s and Gavin Cato’s,” she said.
The One Crown Heights anniversary event will begin at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 21, with a memorial at the Jewish Children’s Museum at 792 Eastern Parkway. The neighborhood festival will begin at 1 p.m. in Brower Park. For more information about the event, visit Project CARE’s Facebook event page.
