Sholom Ber Raskin — a.k.a. Schlomo, a.k.a. Berel — legendary fishmonger to Hasidic Crown Heights for over 65 years, died on Saturday at the age of 84, Chabad.org reported in an obituary. Raskin was born in Leningrad in 1934, as government authorities had begun to strangle Jewish observance across Soviet Russia. When Raskin was six,…
Just before 1 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, a 22-year-old man was sucker-punched while speaking on the phone in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A few minutes earlier, a 51-year-old man nearby was knocked down and beaten. Neither had anything stolen from them. Both were Jewish. The twin attacks, from the same group of three assailants, make…
Mindel Zaetz’s husband was chased down the street last week by a group of men while he was on his way home from work, just off of Eastern Parkway, the broad thoroughfare that runs through the middle of Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. “He came home really spooked,” said Zaetz, 29, as she was on her…
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon when I walked into The Frock’s pop-up shop. Set up in a corner space in Crown Heights, the light streaming through the windows, racks of clothes lined the walls. By the time I had arrived, at around 2 p.m., the place was bustling; there were women pulling dresses off…
The history of gentrification and white flight in Crown Heights has a surprising figure at its center: the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. As the leader of one of the most influential Jewish groups in New York, Schneerson had an outsized influence on the politics and population of Crown Heights, which contains the headquarters of…
The intensity of the unrest that rocked Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in 1991 is often surprising to those who learn about it. With streets dotted with small businesses and stately architecture, Crown Heights does not look like the site of one of New York’s most significant race riots. However, the legacy of the three-day riot…
Crown Heights was predominantly Jewish from the 1920s through the 1960s, but the neighborhood was more secular than we know it to be today. In 1959, in a humorous column for the Forverts, Joseph Simon Goldstein noted the dramatic shift in observance as the Lubavitch movement began to take more prominence. In his piece, he…
A developer’s plan to erect two luxury buildings in a low-slung residential part of Brooklyn with large Hasidic and black communities sparked the latest wave of concern over skyrocketing rents in the neighborhood, which threatens the two groups who had a history of tension, culminating in the Crown Heights riots of the earl ’90s. Cornell…
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