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/?

Truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s swept under the rug. Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up...

 "Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard."

We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality

We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”

Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.

H5N1 bird flu has jumped to cows, several farm workers have been infected, and scientists are warning about another potential pandemic. According to data from wastewater, the second biggest COVID surge occurred this winter. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 24,000 people have died of COVID so far in 2024.

Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Not to mention that over the past few years, mass shootings have significantly increased, we’ve seen unparalleled attacks on democracy and science, and mental health issues have skyrocketed.

Truth be told, things were bananas even before the pandemic: just think of the Great Recession, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Brexit. Academics use terms like “polycrisis” and “postnormal times” to describe the breadth and scale of the issues we now face.

Welcome to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with. Concerningly, though, “living with it” means tolerating greater suffering and instability than we used to, often without fully noticing or talking about it. When authorities tell us to “resume normal activities” after an on-campus shooting or give guidance on how to increase our heat tolerance in an ever-hotter world, we may sense that something is awry even as we go along with it.

But what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit? Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.

How does this happen? How do we overlook and become hardened to bad things, especially in this scientific and technological age, when we’ve never been more capable of understanding and addressing them? To resist complacency, we must first understand how it operates.

Social scientists have long investigated the social organization of denial or how we collectively achieve reality-adjacent lives in which we do not recognize serious problems or they are made to seem normal. What research has found is that a key way we come to “not see” social problems that should beg for our attention is that disturbing or threatening information is neutralized or evaded.

COVID is a good case study for illustrating the “Collective Denial Playbook” that underpins our new normal reality.

A common strategy to neutralize a social problem is to make knowing about it hard, often by restricting efforts to look into it, like scaling back COVID tracking. In April the CDC ended the requirement that hospitals report COVID admissions and occupancy data, removing one of the last tools we could use to monitor what’s happening. “We now enter the blackout phase of epidemiology” wrote science journalist Laurie Garrett on X, adding: “There will be patients, but their numbers and whereabouts will be unknown….” Disappearing is also accomplished by not alerting the public. For example, during the winter surge, we heard “crickets from the White House.” In fact, as COVID positivity and death rates rose, tweets from CDC director Mandy Cohen decreased.

If the COVID situation is tracked and the public warned, things don’t feel normal. But if we don’t monitor or mention it, then things can feel “back to normal”—fine, even.

Another tactic is minimization. How we describe and measure things shapes how we feel about them. Which is why it’s important to notice when neutralizing language enters the chat. For some time now, turns of phrase like “endemic” and “during COVID” have been common vernacular. So have refrains like “lower hospitalizations than last year.” All of this gives off an “it’s just a cold,” “mission accomplished” vibe, casting the disease into a worry-free zone that’s safely behind us.

This minimization keeps the quiet part quiet: that “the world is still in a pandemic” per the WHO; that more than 73,000 Americans died of COVID in 2023, a higher number than from car accidents or influenza; among those infected, 9 percent and counting have long COVID, a serious and often disabling condition with a disease burden comparable to cancer or heart disease, and an economic cost rivaling the Great Recession, and for which there are no approved treatments. What’s more, each infection is associated with a substantially increased risk of health issues like cognitive dysfunction, autoimmune disease and cardiovascular problems, even for mild infections.

Pre-pandemic, these statistics would have been eye-popping. Now they constitute “back to normal.” We think we no longer have a problem, when actually we’ve just changed the standard by which we deem something concerning.

Yet, to shore up collective denial, we often do more than revise the present; we also rewrite the past. So not only do we reiterate that we are better off now, we claim things were never that bad. This sort of “forgetting work,” or contesting the past to remove unwanted memories, produces a cultural amnesia about the pandemic. And in burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.

Finally, truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s swept under the rug. Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants. And so those who wear masks are ridiculed, scientists reporting on COVID-19 risks are cast as fearmongers, and those with long COVID are dismissed as having anxiety disorders.

Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard.

These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.

So what can we do about our “Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.

To counter the new normal’s assault on normalcy, we must double down on our duty to know, to speak up, and to remember.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-hit-peak-denial-heres-why-we-cant-turn-away-from-reality//