Brooklyn, NY – They were two fathers caught up in the storm of the 1991 Crown Heights riots – one black, the other white – who bonded over the shared grief of losing their sons.
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Carmel Cato and Max Rosenbaum reached out to each other in their darkest hour to heal a borough split along racial lines.
Cato, 56, reached out again to Rosenbaum's family, placing a long distance call to Australia to express condolences over his old friend's death.
"I'm so shocked, I don't know what to say," Cato told Rosenbaum's wife, Ruth, and son Norman in the brief call he made.
Norman and Ruth Rosenbaum told Cato they were moved by his sympathies.
"We'll get together," Norman Rosenbaum told Cato.
Max Rosenbaum died Sunday at his home in Australia after suffering a heart attack, as was reported here by Vin News. He was 85.
In August 1991, a Hasidic driver accidentally hit and killed Cato's son, Gavin, a 7-year-old black child. Irate blacks formed a mob that descended on Max Rosenbaum's son Yankel, a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar, yelling "Get the Jew!" and stabbing him four times. He later died.
A decade after the riots ripped Brooklyn, Carmel Cato and Max Rosenbaum met at City Hall in 2001. In a show of solidarity, they condemned racial violence. [NY Daily News]
What anon 2:45 said. I knew him well. He was certainly a scholar, and he was kind of chassidish but he didn’t identify with any labels, he called himself “just a Yid”. He learned in Lubavitch and davened there, and the family has Lubavitcher roots, but he didn’t dress like one and he didn’t call himself one. His midah was “Emes” and he didn’t put up with fakery from anybody, which meant that he didn’t really fit in to any one category.
Oh, and Mrs Rosenbaum’s name is Faye, not Ruth.
he wasnt a hasidic scholar. he wasnt even lubavitch. he was an academic and a business man in ny for a few months doing research at nyu for his doctorate in history. youd think after all these year’s the press might get it right that not everyone in crown heights with a beard is a “hasidic scholar”