8 Responses

1. Rosenbaum was NOT a Lubavitcher, not Hasidic, nor, as the media alternately reported, a rabbinical student. He was a doctoral student of history at the university of Melbourne who happened to be Orthodox- and wore elements of the commonly recognized Orthodox ““: full beard… a black yarmulke, light blue button-down shirt and black pants, with… tzitzis… Rosenbaum was doing on the Holocaust for his .

   Rosenbaum was not killed for being a Lubavitcher, but for looking the part of an Orthodox Jew- just like , a non-Jewish Italian man who happened to be wearing a beard and suit in the wrong place at the wrong time. The media, and some in the Jewish community, continue to obscure Rosenbaum’s real identity so he can operate as a more powerful symbol in a quid-pro-quo narrative- who he was is not as important as how he died, and he will apparently forever be associated with Chabad simply because he happened to be killed in Crown Heights.

   But that’s just plain sloppy research. Next time please get your facts straight.

2. # 1) You are sooo wrong.
   Its true that he was a doctoral student of history at the university of Melbourne. But he also happened to be a bal teshuva with Chabad and was learning in crown heights in a yeshiva at the time of the attack.

3. Who cares if he was a Lubavitcher or not? He was a jew and thats why he was killed. You they were looking to kill just Lubavitchers? (like they know the difference) And even if he was, would he have then been in the right place at the right time? It could have been anyone that got killed. Who ever it would be was at the wrong place at the wrong time, even if really a lubavitcher.

4. Yankel Rosenbaum’s murder and the murder of the Italian gentleman were terrible events during the uncontrolled Crown Heights Riot. We should never forget them and the two people responsible for the riot going unchecked for almost three days…Mayor David(do nothing)Dinkins and Governor Mario(too liberal) Coumo. Dinkins held the police back from protecting lives and property and Coumo should have called out the National Guard..put them on the streets with live ammunition and orders to shoot looters and anyone rioting. Max Rosenbaum rest in peace.

5. He was not a baal teshuva
   he was born in australia and frum all his life
   get your info straight
   he was stabbed only because he was a jew
   he was a kodesh
   his father and mother suffered terribly after the murder

   his parents were ehrlicher yidden nice jews
   Unfortunately everyidiot that doesnt know any information likes to post

6. I knew him.
   Yes he was always Frum. He was not a Lubavitcher. His brother Norman is. He also did not usually wear black pants.
   They are valid corrections to the post.
   But why does any of this matter?
   HE was a Yid who was killed because of this.

7. bugyes- It matters because people are creating a myth about your friend before your very eyes. As I said, who he actually was is apparently no longer as important as who people can make him out to be- in this case, some kind of Chabad Hasid (be it a BT, or a rabbinical student, or whatever). I think it also ties into people’s desire to construct a narrative arc of Rosenbaum’s death- a Chabad Hasid accidentally killed a black boy, there was a riot in Crown Heights, and then blacks killed a Chabad Hasid in revenge. But the truth is that Mr. Rosenbaum’s death is just as much about randomness as it is hatred. He was, as I said before, in the wrong place at the wrong time. People don’t want to hear this, so they construct a false history in which Rosenbaum is a Chabadnik par excellence, as opposed to a regular Jew with a beard happening to be in the neighborhood.

   If anything, I would think that people that actually knew him and his family would be angry that various media sources, including Chabad, continue to perpetuate incorrect information about Mr. Rosenbaum and rewrite his very identity. There is nothing morally wrong about being a Lubavitcher. But there is something wrong with spreading misinformation for the sake of making an ideologically convenient narrative

   Simply put, Mr. Rosenbaum was a real person, not a symbol, and the facts of his life should be remembered accurately. He should not be reinvented after his death so he can be a martyr or poster boy for specifically anti-Lubavitcher persecution.

8. I knew Yankel too. Friar has it pretty much right. I don’t know who this Yochi person is, but he couldn’t be more wrong. Yankel grew up frum and was not learning in a yeshivah in Crown Heights at the time of his murder. In fact the only reason he was in CH that day was because the place he had been staying at in Flatbush was unavailable for a few weeks, so some of his Australian friends who were learning in CH put him up in their dorm room until he could move back to Flatbush.

   On the other hand, it’s not as if he had nothing to do with Lubavitch. He learned in Lubavitch, he davened in Lubavitch, and if there was one group within Orthodoxy with which he could identify more than any other it would probably have been Lubavitch. But he didn’t believe in labels. His midah was Emes, and he didn’t tolerate fakery from anyone, great or small, so he didn’t exactly fit in to any one group, and wasn’t interested in doing so. He was “just a Jew”. He wore tzitzis and a yarmulke and had a beard, but he wore coloured shirts and jeans, not the charedi “uniform”.

   Two quibbles with “The Town Crier”. I would not call him particularly Chassidish more than anything else. But I would call him a Torah scholar. He wasn’t learning full time at that point in his life, but for his age he knew a lot of Torah. He didn’t make a show of it, but he had a lot of seforim, and they didn’t just sit on the shelf, he actually used them a lot.