Rabbi Dies After Livery Cab Runs Over Him 3 Times
A Lubavitcher rabbi was struck three times by a livery cab in Brooklyn on June 29, killing him.
The rabbi, Yekutiel Rapp, 66, was hit on a street near his home in the Crown Heights neighborhood. The livery cab hit Rapp while attempting to reverse into a parking space, then sped over him.
“People were screaming, ‘Stop the car,’” witness Josh Fish told local news website DNAinfo. “He backed up over the guy three times.”
Rapp was a faculty member at a yeshiva located at the headquarters of the Lubavitch movement at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. A father of four, he moved to Brooklyn from Israel at the age of 20. Upon his death, Chabad-linked news sites posted a number of photos of Rapp with the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994.
A large funeral procession was held for Rapp in Crown Heights on June 30.
An NYPD spokesperson said on July 1 there had been no arrests and the investigation was ongoing.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO