http://pix11.com/2014/10/14/tensions-high-in-crown-heights-as-latest-mob-attack-recalls-riots/

Recent attacks on Jewish men in Brooklyn are raising concerns about two things being on the rise in the borough: hate crimes, and racial and ethnic tensions in general. Those concerns resulted in the borough president convening a show of support by community leaders on Tuesday to stand united against bias crime, even as some people on the streets of Crown Heights described an increasingly strained relationship among the community’s many groups.

The most high profile of the recent crimes raising concern happened on Saturday night, around 9 p.m. The scene was captured on surveillance video of dozens of teens rushing the Gourmet Butcher corner grocery store, on Troy Avenue.

Some of the teens ran inside the store and upended merchandise, another one punched the brother of store owner Yanki Klein in the jaw. All of it was captured on the store’s surveillance camera.

That video has some residents in Crown Heights recalling video of rioting that consumed the neighborhood 23 years ago.

“It makes me think back to 1991 in the riots,” said resident Malca Bayzman, “when they were throwing rocks at my house and the house next door to me and breaking car windows.”

The mob rush happened on Saturday. Four days earlier, outside of the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, a pro-Palestinian protester punched the director of the King’s Bay YMHA, Leonard Petlakh, in the left eye, while he waved an Israeli flag outside of an exhibition game between the Brooklyn Nets and Maccabi Tel Aviv from Israel.

On Tuesday, Petlakh was speaking with a positive tone, at an event at Borough Hall set up to show support for him.

“It’s a message for all of us,” said Petlakh, “not to be afraid and to stand up together.”

He was talking about a news conference set up by Borough President Eric Adams Tuesday afternoon. The event, attended by African-American, Caribbean-American, Jewish and Muslim leaders from Brooklyn as well as a few state elected officials, and the city’s public advocate and comptroller, was organized to send a message against hate.

It was also intended to convey that the tensions that sparked the 1991 riots have calmed.

“Those days, the sun has already set,” said Adams at the news conference. “We’re in a new dawn and a new day in Crown Heights.”

As Adams pointed out at the news conference, a variety of community groups have formed in Crown Heights and elsewhere in Brooklyn, dedicated to preventing violence like that seen during the riots a generation ago.

One of those groups is the Council of Peoples Organization, or COPO, which is directed by Mohammad Razvi, who spoke at the news conference.

“It is appalling what they had done!” Razvi exclaimed, regarding the attack on Petlakh.

“They may have called themselves Muslims,” Razvi, a leader in the Pakistani-American Muslim community, said about the attackers, “but the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that to hurt one is to hurt all of mankind.”

Razvi embraced Petlakh at the news conference, and pointed out that the YWHA, under Petlakh’s leadership, has done extensive work to promote unity among vastly different groups in Brooklyn, including Razvi’s. He said that he’d worked with Petlakh on a variety of projects over the last eight years.

The sense of togetherness and harmony at Borough Hall had a less intense feel on the streets of Crown Heights, however. On Tuesday afternoon, outside the Gourmet Butcher shop, which the crowd of teens had tried to trash on Saturday, a local man loudly complained about a nearby sukkah, or ceremonial hut used to commemorate the Jewish holiday Sukkot, which is currently under way.

“It’s blocking the sidewalk!” The man shouted. He also questioned whether or not it had a permit.

To which a person who came out of the sukkah replied, as he followed the man up the street and into the next block, “Why do you teach your children to hate?” The man who was complaining was holding the hands of elementary school-age children. He cursed at the man who had emerged from the sukkah.

It’s evident that there are tensions among different groups in Crown Heights, even though the level of intensity does not seem to match the year of the riots.

It was a point not lost on the owner of the store that was mobbed. The crime against him, his brother and his property is not officially classified as a hate crime, according to the NYPD, since the boys have apparently attacked other, non-Jewish targets in the past.

Still, store owner Yanki Klein said that the way not to return to 1991 is vigilance against any aggression.

“I don’t think we’re going [back],” he told PIX11 News, but he warned that violence in his community could escalate. “It’s going somewhere. It’s not a joke.”

Detectives continue to search for the young men who trashed Klein’s store, as well as for Petlakh’s attacker.