From: engelson-sean@cs.yale.edu (Sean Philip Engelson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish,soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Some good news from Crown Heights
Date: 30 Dec 1992 12:35:48 -0500
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The following is quoted (w/o permission) from the 30 December NY
Times, page B3.  Please excuse my typos.

ABOUT NEW YORK / Michael T. Kaufman

For Lubavitch Rappers,
Harmony Breeds Peace

The Hasid was sitting in his study in Crown Heights receiving
visitors while upstairs some of his seven children were playing
noisily.  Presently, the doorbell rang and a tall black man was
led into the book-lined room.  The Hasid rose from the table,
stretched his arm high over his head.  "Yo," he said, and the two
men slapped palms.

"Communication/ all across the nation/ Let's all sit down and
have a conversation," intoned David Lazerson, as students of the
small alternative yeshiva he runs in his home listened to the
42-year old scholar rapping.

"Understanding/ I listen to you/ you listen to me/ We can work
things out in harmony," responded Paul Chandler, a Baptist
ministed who is one of Mr. Lazerson's partners in an effort to
build bridges between young black meb and young men from the
Chabad Lubavitcher community.

The two embraced, continuing through the lyrics they have been
performing with Dr. Laz and the Cure, a group that includes black
and Hasidic backup singers and dancers, for more than six months.
Musically, the style is definitely inner-city, but the spirit and
mission recall nothing quite so much as the team of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza.  "Respect each other's feelings/ respect who
you are/ respect each other's culture/ and we'll all go far/ we
got the Cure/ that's for sure/ we got the cure/ that's for sure."

Quixotic, yes, and surreal as an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, the
two men sang while on the streets, two distinct and immediately
identifiable sets of people---blacks, many of them immigrants
from the Carribean, and the black-hatted Lubavitcher men and
bewigged Lubavitcher housewives---passed as something less than
neighbors, often impervious to each other, sometimes hostile.

"Sure it's hard," said Mr. Chandler, the assistant director of
the Jackie Robinson Center for Physical Culture.  "I've been
called an Uncle Tom for joining up with Doctor Laz in Project
Cure and I know he's been called an Uncle Irving by people within
his community, but something is definitely happening, something
has definitely started."

		*	*	*

For one thing, there was the joint Hanukkah and Kwanzaa
celebration organized by Project Cure and held last Saturday in a
black community center.  "There were maybe 120 people there, 25
Hasidim and the rest black," said Mr. Lazerson, somehow making
the modest numbers sound triumphant.  "It was great.  We lit
Hanukkah candles, gave out dreidels, and the black kids showed us
some incredible dancing."

There have been other events that, though modest in attendance,
were amazing for having taken place at all.  First there were the
initial meetings in fall 1991, when, after a summer of turbulence
in Crown Heights, Mr. Lazerson, a former Buffalo public school
teacher, and Richard Green, a black community organizer, gathered
some 60 black and Lubavitcher youths at neighborhood schools for
what diplomats call free and frank discussions.  "It turned out
we didn't really know anything about each other," said Mr.
Lazerson, whose school is for young men who have failed in
traditional Jewish schools.

"The black kids wanted to know why we wear the clothes we do, why
our married women wear wigs," said Mr. Lazerson, who has a
doctorate in special education.  "They asked if we were all rich,
all successful.  Our guys asked about dreadlocks, Rastafarians
and reggae.  The black guys learned some of us were surviving on
public assistance and that some of us were not very good
students.  Our guys learned that some of them studied more than
almost any of us."  He added that in his community no one thought
much would come of those meetings.  "They may have thought it was
a public relations thing that would go away."

		*	*	*

The two men also helped organize basketball games with
black-Lubavitcher teams, and next month two of these will play at
Madison Square Garden during halftime at a Knicks game.  Hundreds of
CURE T-shirts have been distributed.  More free and frank
discussions were held at yeshivas and public schools.  And about 20
blacks and 20 Lubavitcher youths travelled by bus to the Apollo
Theater in Harlem to see the documentary about black soldiers
liberating Nazi death camps.  At all these events at some point the
young people begin to chant "increase the peace."

The biggest thing so far, said Mr. Chandler, was the CURE float in
the Afro-Carribean parade on Labor Day.  "That was the
breakthrough," he said.  There on Eastern Parkway, as more than a
million watched and tens of thousands strutted in the gala
procession of ornate costumes and pelvic thrusting, was the CURE
float.  Bu comparison to the feathered West Indian contingent, it
was modest.  On it, a young Hasid, in skullcap and earlocks,
arguably the least graceful participant in the parade, danced
enthusiastically alongside black colleagues.  Along with the
laughter he generated came the greatest cheers.  Cheers for effort.

"That was the turning point," said Mr. Chandler.  "Increase the
peace," said Dr. Laz.

-- 
Sean Philip (Shlomo) Engelson		
Yale Department of Computer Science	
Box 2158 Yale Station			
New Haven, CT 06520			
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish