Brooklyn Jews File Rights Suit Against Mayor, Ex-Police Official

NEW YORK —  Mayor David N. Dinkins and former police commissioner Lee Brown unconstitutionally discriminated against Jewish residents of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood by failing to protect them from rampaging black gangs during four days of racial rioting in August, 1991, a lawsuit filed Tuesday charges.

The class-action suit, filed in Brooklyn federal district court, is the latest round in the escalating war of words between Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, and Jews outraged by the acquittal of a black teen-ager in the stabbing death of a Hasidic Jewish scholar during the Crown Heights turmoil.

The suit alleges that Dinkins and Brown, who was the city’s first black police commissioner, conspired to withhold police protection and investigative services from Crown Heights’ Jewish community, which is largely composed of members of an ultra-orthodox sect known as the Lubavitchers.

As a result, the suit contends, the lives and property of Jewish residents were placed at the mercy of “anti-Semitic criminals.”

Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar from Australia, was killed and more than 100 other people were injured during the four-day conflict in Crown Heights, a once-largely middle-income and Jewish neighborhood that now is predominantly low-income and black.

Dinkins, elected mayor in 1989 with a campaign stressing unity and harmony among the city’s ethnically diverse residents, called the charges in the suit “preposterous” and “clearly untrue.” He said that he expected the city attorney to petition the court for an early dismissal of the case.

The mayor, in a statement, denied treating the rioters in any special way and said that he remained troubled “by those who wish to further escalate the tension and pain caused by Yankel Rosenbaum’s murder and the subsequent jury verdict.”

Lemrick Nelson, the lone suspect in Rosenbaum’s death, was acquitted of the murder on Oct. 29, despite police testimony that he had a knife covered with the victim’s blood and was identified by Rosenbaum himself.

The racial conflict in Crown Heights erupted last year after a car in the entourage of the Lubavitcher’s spiritual leader, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, killed a 7-year-old black child.