In 1888, Jews in New York City brought Jacob Joseph, a talmudist of the old school, from Russia to serve as the city’s chief rabbi. The plan to have a single rabbi preside over a large and fractious American Jewish community failed, but when Rabbi Joseph died in 1902, hundreds of thousands turned out for the funeral. Local Gentiles attacked the procession, and when police arrived they joined in the violence. But the reaction of New York Jewry was very different from what followed the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom, and includes important lessons for today. Andrew Silow-Carroll writes:
A day after the violence, various leaders formed the East Side Vigilance League to demand a fair investigation and punishment for the offending officers. At the same time, Jewish lawyers rushed to the courts to defend Jews unfairly singled out in the violence. “They were uptown and downtown,” [the author of a recent book on the subject wrote] of the lawyers. “They were Democrat and Republican. They were Reform and they were Orthodox.”
Over the next few months, the calls for justice would be surprisingly, and unprecedentedly, effective.
More about: American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, Lower East Side, New York City, Pogroms