Man arrested after brutal beating of Crown Heights rabbi
The police have arrested and charged 26-year-old Oniel Gilbourne with assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon on September 12, 2019. It is alleged that Gilbourne punched and beat Rabbi Avraham Gopin in the face with a paving stone while on his morning jog in a Crown Heights park.
The violent attack on August 27, 2019, which left the 63-year-old rabbi bloodied, with a broken nose and two missing teeth, was “one in a string of incidents which sort of amount to something of a pattern,” said Rabbi Eli Cohen, the president of the Jewish Community Council.
“It was hate,’’ said Gopin to CBS2 News, as he explained what he believed was the motive for the crime committed against him. “He said Jew, Jew. He said something in that direction,” Gopin told the reporter as they walked through the site of the crime, a place he called “the battlefield.”
By the end of August 2019, the NYPD had recorded 145 complaints of anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city. In 2018 there were 88 complaints, which means hate crimes have already increased by 61% this year.
In Crown Heights alone, by the end of June 2019, there had already been 5 arrests and 13 complaints for anti-Jewish hate crimes. These statistics excluded the attack on the rabbi and another two days after. On August 29, a 34-year-old man was hospitalized, allegedly after his car window was pelted with ice and shattered.
Days before Gilbourne was charged, James Caldwell, the president of the 77th Precinct Community Council, said he believed the attack on the rabbi was driven by mental illness, not anti-Semitism.
Responding to those allegations, Cohen said, “we have to deal with that, without making an excuse that it’s a mental health issue.” The rabbi explained, “the fact that they chose a target that looks a particular way still counts, it’s still serious.”
The tension between Jews and African Americans in Crown Heights goes back nearly thirty years.
In August 1991, Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela Cato, both seven-year-old African Americans, were hit by a car driven by Yosef Lifsh, a member of the Hassidic community. It was alleged that Lifsh was rushed to hospital by the Jewish community’s private ambulance service, leaving the Cato’s waiting for the city’s emergency services to rescue them. Gavin Cato died the evening of the accident and his cousin suffered serious injuries.
During the three days of civil unrest that followed, Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Jewish doctoral student from Australia died after he was stabbed by a 16-year-old African American boy, Lemrick Nelson Jr.
The tortured history of Crown Heights and the struggle that the community has since endured is still vivid for Richard Green, co-founder of the Crown Heights Youth Collective. “I don’t wanna say it’s becoming an epidemic, because it’s not,” said Green of the recent attacks. The violence towards Jewish people living in the area is entirely regrettable, it is an opportunity for both sides of the community to grow in understanding of one another, he said.
Costa Rican-born Christine Samuels has worked at her uncle’s store on Nostrand Avenue for the past 10 years. She says hate crimes are inexcusable, but there is a lingering tension that may account for it. She has often heard that black residents are pushed out of their homes, forced to sell by their Jewish neighbors. “I don’t believe they should have that right, to take away ownership.”
Refael Tessler, a South African immigrant, says he’s observed the same phenomenon. He thinks that the hateful violence is a sign of the times in a rapidly changing neighborhood. “It’s not because we’re Jewish, it’s because we’re the other. It’s just a reality of gentrification.” Tessler says, “The us and them game has to stop.”
Like Green, Tessler says he still has hope for greater integration between the races represented in the community. They remembered with fondness the advice of former Mayor Dinkins of New York when he visited their strained community after the riots.
“We’re not two communities, we’re one community living together,” says Tessler recalling Dinkins’ advice.
