It was widely known in Crown Heights that the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, then age 91, was having surgery at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the day the shooting took place. Halberstam believes Baz got wind of the appointment and staked out the rebbe to avenge the Hebron massacre.

 

Her son was fatally shot on the Brooklyn Bridge. But Devorah Halberstam says the full story remains untold

 

30 years later, she’s still angry, still mourning and still seeking justice — and the truth

 

Devorah Halberstam with a photo of her son Ari, who was fatally shot on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994.

It’s been 30 years since 16-year-old Ari Halberstam was murdered by a cab driver who shot up a van taking Lubavitcher kids across the Brooklyn Bridge. The gunman, Rashid Baz, died in prison last year while serving a 141-year sentence. 

But Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, wants you to know that the full story has yet to be told. 

“I’m still fighting for justice for Ari,” she said in an interview in her home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the first thing you see in the living room is a photo of teenage Ari, frozen in time. 

Antisemitism Notebook

“Everything was minimized and contained: I had to fight to have it classified as terrorism,” she continued. “I know all the pieces of the puzzle. And I’ll never understand: Who were we protecting? All the evidence was there.”

Among the “obvious questions” she’s angry that Baz never answered: “How’d you get the guns? Why were you on the bridge at the same time as the van? You just bumped into them? You just happened to be fully loaded with a machine gun, a Glock pistol and a ‘street sweeper’ .380, and you said, ‘Oh, Hasids on the bus, let me shoot them up.’”

And, most important: “Who else was in on it?”

Was there a conspiracy?

Halberstam called the shooting an act of terror from the outset, but it took five years for the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to classify the case as terrorism. The government still rejects Halberstam’s contention that Baz was part of a conspiracy. But the Anti-Defamation League posted a new $50,000 reward last year for information in the case, saying: “The question remains: Were others involved?” 

I sent a detailed request to the U.S. attorney’s office for comment on this story, but did not hear back.

Why, one might ask, does any of this matter now? Baz is dead. And Halberstam has spent the last three decades getting antiterrorism laws passed. She also co-founded a Jewish children’s museum in Ari’s memory. So what more does she want, this woman who tears up in a nanosecond at the mention of her first-born son — a basketball player who made everyone laugh, a child who taught his Hasidic mother that you can be, in Halberstams’s words, “deeply religious” and at the same time, “an all-American kid”? 

What could she possibly expect from the meetings she still holds with government officials, badgering them about a case they closed the book on years ago? 

What she wants, she said, is the truth: “The truth doesn’t go away. And it needs to be told over and over.” 

FOIA requests denied 

As a Jewish New Yorker myself, and as a reporter who covered the Lubavitcher community — including the Crown Heights riots — for The Associated Press in the 1990s, I’ve followed this case for a long time. I’ve filed Freedom of Information Act requests with various governmental agencies over the years, hoping for answers to Halberstam’s questions. But all I’ve gotten is a few unenlightening pages related to the deportation of Baz’s uncle to Jordan. He and another man concealed evidence by repairing Baz’s shot-up car. 

I thought this year might be different. Why keep things classified 30 years later if the government believes there was no conspiracy?

The reason given: “national security.”

I appealed, arguing that the public has a right to know and questioning the logic of keeping anything secret this many years on. How come I can read all about the government’s failures in preventing 9/11 and the murders of 3,000 people, but a March 14, 1994, cable labeled “Terrorist Threat Warning System in the United States” in an online archive of Halberstam documents remains classified? 

So far I’ve lost my appeals.

“I hope you write that in your article,” Halberstam said. “They’re hiding something.”

Revenge for the Hebron massacre 

This 1999 report from the Department of Justice reclassified Ari’s murder as terrorism. 

Authorities initially characterized Baz’s 1994 attack as “road rage” following a traffic dispute. Then at trial, the defense said that Baz, who was Lebanese, was traumatized growing up during that country’s civil war, and that a “flashback” prompted him to shoot when he saw the boys in the van wearing the black hats and coats marking them as Jews. 

Baz’s lawyer also said he was angry over a massacre of 29 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, carried out by religious extremist Baruch Goldstein five days before the bridge shooting. Baz’s mother was Palestinian. 

Witnesses testified that Baz heard a “raging antisemitic sermon” at a Brooklyn mosque hours after the Hebron massacre. “This takes the mask off the Jews,” the imam reportedly said. “It shows them to be racist and fascist and as bad as the Nazis. Palestinians are suffering from the occupation, and it’s time to end it.”   

Years later, Baz told the authorities: “I only shot them because they were Jewish.” That admission stands in stark contrast to a police investigator’s comment, early on, that Baz had “no politics and no real religion.” One lawyer described Baz as simply “nuts.”

“But he wasn’t,” Halberstam said. “He was crazy as a fox, as all terrorists are. He did this with intent.” 

‘It wasn’t a coincidence’

Aerial view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was widely known in Crown Heights that the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, then age 91, was having surgery at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the day the shooting took place. Halberstam believes Baz got wind of the appointment and staked out the rebbe to avenge the Hebron massacre. 

Halberstam thinks the authorities had an inkling something was up because police stopped by Chabad headquarters the night before, telling people not to follow the rebbe’s motorcade “for security reasons.”

After the rebbe left the hospital, his entourage entered the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in Manhattan to take him home, and officials temporarily blocked the tunnel to other cars. Baz, driving his cab, “couldn’t get into the tunnel after the rebbe,” Halberstam said, so he headed to the nearest alternate route: the Brooklyn Bridge. “It wasn’t a coincidence that he bumped into this van,” she said.

Halberstam believes Baz targeted the Jewish boys wearing black hats and coats as a substitute for the rebbe. He shot 40 rounds at the van while driving. Ari was one of four boys hit, and the only one to die.

Baz fled back to Brooklyn where his uncle, who owned the car, helped remove the shattered windshield. Where Baz got the ammunition and guns — which he claimed he kept in the cab for self-defense after being robbed — remains unknown. 

Civil rights 

Halberstam said the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger murdered in Georgia in 2020 by two white men, “was an eye-opener for me.” Arbery’s mother successfully fought to have that case prosecuted on federal hate crime charges, not just murder.  

Halberstam feels the bridge shooting — which she describes as the “worst attack on Jews in the history of New York City” — should also have been investigated by the feds as a violation of the boys’ civil rights, and not simply a shooting under state law.

Police at a 30th anniversary memorial for Ari Halberstam on the Brooklym Bridge

“My son was murdered because he was identifiable as a Jew,” she said. “So is there a double standard because they were Jews? That’s the very big question in retrospect.” In other words, she believes antisemitism, on the part of investigators and prosecutors, may have influenced how the case was handled. 

But she said she understands why the case wasn’t immediately classified as terrorism: “Terrorism was on nobody’s radar screen in 1994.” The first World Trade Center bombing had taken place the year before, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000, “but they treated that as isolated.” 

Still, at a commemoration held at the bridge on the 30th anniversary of the attack, New York Mayor Eric Adams said Halberstam was prescient in calling the case terrorism. “If we would have listened, there may have been a different approach to Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.

A mother’s grief

Halberstam’s grief is never far away. Sobs caught in her throat over and over as we talked.

“That’s the part that you can’t share with everybody,” she said. “It lives in your heart. It’s in your own private moments. It’s not that people are not compassionate. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s not that people don’t have patience for it. It’s that unless a person’s been there, there’s just no explaining it. There’s no, ‘You’ll get over it.’ There’s no ‘Time will heal.’

“It doesn’t matter what I do,” she continued. “You fill it up, but there’s a hole at the bottom, so it just goes right through. It’s empty.”

Ari had four younger siblings. He’s forever 16, but they grew up, married, had kids of their own. When I asked Halberstam how many grandchildren she has, she said, “Not enough,” because Ari’s are missing.

Ari’s legacy

Ari’s murder turned Halberstam into an activist. She’s credited with helping to write the first laws in New York State against terrorism; she lectures and trains law enforcement on hate crimes, terrorism and antisemitism; and she’s an advocate for victims’ rights, serving, among other things, on a city commission for hate crimes. 

And yet, she said, “If anybody says, ‘Look what you’ve accomplished’ — don’t even go there with me. It’s on the coattails of my son’s murder. I’m still the mother in the corner, weeping for my dead child.”

READ MORE:

https://forward.com/news/629361/devorah-halberstam-ari-brooklyn-bridge-shooting/?

Jewish law has plenty to say about lying — and it certainly does not recommend doing nothing.

"The problem of an unchecked lie matters for all Americans, but it especially matters for the Jewish community — because the big lie of Jewish power, and the antisemitism that often follows it, thrives in an environment where flagrant lies are acceptable."

Trump’s lies are more dangerous than ever — does Jewish law have a solution?

 

After the first presidential debate, it’s clear that Americans must take the threat of a public culture defined by lies seriously

Thursday’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made one thing clear: American citizens must figure out how to define and react to a lie, with a particular emphasis on reaction. 

Two of America’s most seasoned journalists, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper — both of whom happen to be Jewish — failed to respond to egregious lies during the debate, highlighting that lies are our greatest social and political challenge, and that non-response to them has wrongly become a norm. 

Jewish law has plenty to say about lying — and it certainly does not recommend doing nothing.

One of the things it points out: Facing a skilled liar head-on can be tough. And when it comes to facing someone like Trump, whose lies have recently earned him a conviction on 34 felony counts, it’s debatable whether he should have the opportunity to show off that skill set.

“Halakhah (Jewish law) treats ordinary lying as a vice, and lying in court as a crime for both witnesses and judges,” said Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership. “Criminally convicted liars lose core privileges of citizenship such as the right to testify. They may also be prevented from taking oaths, which can put them at a disadvantage in business.”

Yet if anything, Trump’s lies seemed to give him an edge on his opponent; left unconstrained, he was free to perform. 

“I’m not sure I’d ever watched Donald Trump lie so incessantly, extravagantly and unabashedly, and that’s saying something,” Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times. “On Thursday night he lied about the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He lied about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He lied about his relationship with the military, about his concern for the environment — about pretty much any and every subject that came up. He lied with a smile. He lied with a shrug. He lied with a sneer.” 

When Trump twisted the truth until it sounded like Democrats support killing babies on arrival, the feminist writer Jessica Valenti wrote on X, “I’m sorry, but Trump just claimed that Democrats allow “after birth” abortion and the moderators’ only response was “thank you”???”

The problem of an unchecked lie matters for all Americans, but it especially matters for the Jewish community — because the big lie of Jewish power, and the antisemitism that often follows it, thrives in an environment where flagrant lies are acceptable.

So what does Judaism have to say about lying? Plenty.

Trump’s lies and Jewish law

I was interested in hearing more about “core privileges of citizenship” that a criminally convicted liar might lose.

“Being judges,” Rabbi Klapper said. “The ability to take an oath was an essential part of participating in public life, because otherwise you couldn’t defend yourself or your property in many situations.”

At what point do we as citizens believe that lying precludes a person from “participating in public life” — like, perhaps, being featured in televised debates? Or being eligible to run for president?

Jewish law also outlines potential physical punishment for lying in court; “Perjured witnesses can also be given lashes, like most halakhic criminals,” Klapper said. But Rabbi Klapper cautioned that such punishment was extremely rare. And of course, this was ancient law — not modern practice.

There is also the famous and, as Rabbi Klapper put it, “weird” case of eidim zomemim, or witnesses who lie. 

“Eidim zomemim are dealt the very same punishment they intended to generate with their false testimony,” writes Rav Moshe Taragin of Torat Har Etzion, summarizing the views of Masekhet Makkot. “For example, if eidim zomemim conspired to obligate capital punishment, they themselves are executed; if they intended to cause financial loss, they must reimburse their intended victim.” 

It’s one of the most unforgettable parts of Jewish law, which shocked me when I first encountered it as a child: If you go to court and undertake a conspiracy to wrongly bring the death penalty upon your innocent neighbor, you might pay with your life for trying to take away his. This extraordinary expression of the high value Judaism places on the truth also shows that Jewish law believes that a liar who meaningfully harms others in a court of law should be penalized.

Thinking about eidim zomemim reminded me of Trump’s involvement in the infamous case of the Central Park Five. After five Black teenagers were arrested on rape charges — which turned out to be false — Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging that they receive the death penalty.

Even when it was clearly established that the teenagers, who served 6 to 13 years in prison, had been falsely accused, and even when a serial rapist was linked to the crime through DNA evidence and confessed, Trump faced no consequences. And he continued to bear down, and continued to suggest the Central Park Five deserved harsh punishment. “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein and if you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that,” Trump said in 2019.

Jewish principles regarding eidim zomemim acknowledge that a lie can be damaging and even lethal to others. The idea is worth considering: Certain kinds of lies are a clear and plain danger to life itself.

That was clearly the case in Trump’s involvement in the case of the Central Park Five; it remains so today, as he amply demonstrated in the debate. Consider his lie, highlighted by Valenti, that Democrats support the “abortion” of babies after they are born; such distortions are a direct threat to the lives of people whose pregnancies threaten their health, as maternal mortality is already on the rise amid a national crackdown on abortion rights. 

Returning to the Torah

It’s worth taking another look at the verses in the Torah that address lying. “Leviticus 19:11 forbids lying and Exodus 23 commands us to go even further and distance ourselves from lies,” said Klapper.

There is a danger to having our public lives so structured by lies and liars — and particularly to having such a pernicious one in our living rooms, on national television, and in the Oval Office. 

In 2016, Trump’s outrageousness was rewarded with the presidency. Over the past four years, many of us have let fade the memory of the profound rot in our culture that followed his first term in office; the sense of rot we felt in our own souls. This time, we cannot treat his lies with the same cavalier attitude. We owe it to the U.S. — and the world — to react.

https://forward.com/opinion/628743/trumps-lies-debate-biden/?

Western civilization is being destroyed by its own decadence! And boy do they want the only decent, peace-exporting country in the whole Middle East – Israel – to fail.

 

 One doesn’t always appreciate what one has until it’s too late. Cheaters look upon their wrecked families and suddenly see that their pre-affair life was comparatively idyllic. Youth is famously wasted on the young, who use their health and energy to binge on toxic substances and attempt to be as miserable as possible.

A similar phenomenon is at play in the politics of the West. We have built the most peaceful, most prosperous, most humane, most progressive civilisation the world has ever known, after centuries of battle – physical, moral and philosophical; carnage and bloodshed.

And now, just 80 years after Auschwitz and 30-odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are apparently already bored of our hard-won liberty and stability. The zeitgeist of the current age is to smash things up while pretending to be building a better world.

Only, as some are beginning to find out, what begins as a performative theory of progressivism ends up in murder, mayhem and misery.

An interesting case study is emerging in Portland, Oregon, where far-Left politics and hard-Left thugs meet violent alt-Righters and skinhead gangs. Once a prosperous city on America’s famously idyllic Pacific north-west coast, it’s become a nightmare that people are leaving in droves.

After the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd – and the insistence that the police were America’s front-running racism delivery service – Portland’s police force was “defunded”, the city’s top prosecutor refused to press charges for low-level crime, and, in 2021, most drug possession was decriminalised.

The result was not the paradise of “equity” that activists were demanding, but rampant homicide rates, a hugely worsening opioid and drug addiction crisis (deaths from opioid overdoses have tripled), the further sprawl of homeless tent encampments, and a general escalation in violence, with car theft having rocketed (30 vehicles a day are reported stolen, according to a report in the Times), along with car and shop window smashing.

In the name of the “safety” of promoting “anti-racism”, Portland has become such a dangerous place that businesspeople are leaving in droves. “Our stores are being broken into. Our merchandise is being taken,” a local businessman told the city council in November 2022. “Our employees can’t go into the office, even if they want to, because they don’t feel safe.”

Having had something so good, and then, through unforgivable decadence, destroyed it (with the bodycount to match), however, Portland is now changing its tune. The drug decriminalisation law has been reversed, low-level crime is once again prosecuted, and the police have been re-funded.

But I’m not just worried about the harm being done to cities and everyday life by social justice ideology – which in the UK is visible in our scaredy-cat approach to stop and search, lenient attitude towards illegal immigrants from countries known to export terror and for the mistreatment of women, and the refusal to tackle low-level crime and shoplifting.

It’s also our stupidity and hubris on the world stage – our grandstanding about meaningless utterances of “peace” and “provocation”. We are forgetting why it is that the free world managed to triumph in the 20th century.

Last week, Nigel Farage outed himself as deeply unfit for leadership by piping the same line as other populists in Europe and the United States: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is effectively our fault because, through Nato expansion, we had “poked” the Russian bear (the accurate reading is that Putin was never “poked”, he is a bloodthirsty madman taking advantage of Western weakness to attack and colonise).

Meanwhile, the soft and useless Left that run the vast majority of international institutions have perhaps read too much postcolonial theory and – while they do tend to champion Ukraine against Russia – they also want, in general, to let rogues, dictators and repressive societies be, while opening the floodgates to an unvetted sea of people fleeing those countries.

And boy do they want the only decent, peace-exporting country in the whole Middle East – Israel – to fail.

Whichever way you look at it, the people in charge, or who are trying to be in charge, don’t get it. Too distanced from the horrors of the 20th century; too comfortable in the stable, peaceful and free societies fought for through blood and tears by their forefathers and mothers, they are embracing appeasement, in the name of a “peace” that literally translates into the triumph of those who want to destroy us.

They remain wilfully blind to the very important lesson of 1945: getting tough on baddies is the only path to meaningful peace.

Instead of shoring our civilisation up, and realising that preserving our societies is a constant battle against forces that want to destroy them, we are choosing to bring our best traditions, institutions and culture to the heel of rotten concepts like populism and isolationism (on the Right), and intersectionality (a Venn diagram of victim statuses), white privilege, equity, inclusion, and a ludicrous gender ideology movement venerating a bewildering array of identities on the Left.

The cost of all this foolery is real and it is apparent. The chickens we’ve laid at home and abroad are already coming home to roost.   

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar-BB1p7LFw