MATTHEW SHAER, formerly a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, has written for New York magazine, Harper's, the Washington Post, and Slate.

Among Righteous Men

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

The residents of 749 are members of the Chabad Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism. They come to Crown Heights, Brooklyn—the seat of the Lubavitch empire—to earn their rabbinical ordination, during which time they maintain a self-imposed exile, shuttling back and forth between the dormitory and the basement shul on the other side of Eastern Parkway. To old-school Lubavitchers, who have lived in the neighborhood for decades, the bochurim—literally, "boys," in Hebrew—of 749 are zealots and fodder for derision. They are often addressed by a range of names: terrorists, the Taliban. The fervor of the bochurim is considered somehow disgraceful, even here, among the ritually fervent.

On December 29, 2007, one of these bochurim, a stout, tousle-headed rabbinical student named Joshua Gur, was sitting in his bedroom on the first floor of 749, surrounded by several friends. The time was 9 p.m. A couple of hours earlier, Gur had attended shul, and walked back across Eastern Parkway under a hushed and heavy sky. Now, his black fedora hanging on the edge of his bed, his black suit jacket draped over a nearby chair, he listened to what sounded like the beginnings of a major league brawl in the room at the end of the hall.

The walls of the dormitory were notoriously thin—essentially, sheets of yellowed paper with only air and roaches and rats in between—and every thump, threat, and body slam was amplified sevenfold, as if the dorm itself were the interior of a giant hand drum. Gur stirred restlessly and pushed his black velvet yarmulke back across his head.

He was twenty-three then. He had fragile brown eyes, always wet to the point of brimming over, and a thick brown beard, which he wore long and unkempt, in accordance with the dictates of the Torah. He had lived in the dormitory for three years, longer than almost anyone else. He knew its rituals. He knew how to kill the rats (sticky pads or poison, preferably both), stave off those slippery, silvery million-legged bugs (Raid, rubbing alcohol, or an open flame), and fix the leaks in the shower room (with chewing gum). Best of all, he spoke English fluently, something his peers couldn't claim to do.

American cities have always played host to ethnic enclaves—the Chinatowns and the Koreatowns, the Russian villages and the Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where locals can go for weeks without speaking a word of English. Jewish Crown Heights was this, and it was more. It was a kind of modern shtetl, recreated within the bustling sprawl of central Brooklyn. The short distances between the west, east, north, and south borders made it easy for Lubavitchers to get around, even on the Sabbath, when driving and work were prohibited. And the sheer density of the settlement—the majority of Jews in Crown Heights lived within a sixteen-square-block area—fostered a sense of community, solidarity, and intimacy.

Still, the outside world often stuck its nose into the affairs of the boys at 749. Once, for instance, the fire department responded to an alarm at the dormitory and found about ten buck-naked Lubavitchers frolicking and swaying in a giant tub in the basement. Gur was there to help explain to the befuddled firemen that this was no sex party but a mikvah—a ritual bath intended to help slough away the month's transgressions. "Relax, gentlemen. This kind of thing is normal in our culture." Welcome to Crown Heights. Welcome to life in the Lubavitch kingdom.

Gur heard the voices in the hallway grow louder. Ten to one, he knew exactly what the racket was about. The feud had been building for days. The two roommates down the hall had never gotten along, but had recently settled into a kind of brooding mutual antipathy, awful to behold.

Outside, the hallway swelled with bodies. Depending on the time of year, there were at least 100 yeshiva students living at 749—during the high holidays the number was closer to 150, not counting the squatters in the basement, who arrived in November, content to crash on the floor in tattered Coleman sleeping bags. Tonight most of them seemed to have trotted down to the first floor, drawn by the promise of a fight. Some held point-and-shoot digital cameras over their heads. Others chattered excitedly. Gur dug into the crowd with his elbows and his right shoulder, twisting and thrashing forward, ignoring the protestations of the onlookers, until he burst across the threshold of Room 107.

According to Gur, a few bochurim stood under a single yellow bulb. "Hey, Shuki," one of the boys said, using Gur's nickname. Gur pulled the door shut behind him to get some privacy. Two years later, sitting in a Brooklyn courtroom, Gur would swear to a jury of his peers that the the fight appeared to have been resolved. He chatted briefly with his classmates, received their assurances they were okay. He turned to go, and ran right into two men wearing dark-blue police uniforms.

Gur recognized both of them. The thinner of the pair was a twenty-one-year-old man named Binyomin Lifshitz. Lifshitz's full-time gig was running CrownHeights.info, a website that purported to cover all aspects of Hasidic life in the neighborhood. Yet he was best known as a member of the Shomrim Rescue Patrol, a Lubavitch security patrol operating out of a car repair shop in south Brooklyn.

The way Gur understood it, the all-volunteer Shomrim, or "guards" in Hebrew, had been founded to do the things that the police wouldn't or couldn't do: chase down purse snatchers, fix flat tires, and direct traffic. Which was all fine with him.

The real police couldn't be in all places all of the time, and sometimes it fell to his fellow Jews to stand up for themselves. In practice, a disciplined Shomrim patrol could help shield the community from the crimes of outsiders. The group could also help mediate internal conflicts before the secular justice system—a system often ignorant of Jewish tradition and law—got involved. But as far as Gur was concerned, the arrival of these Shomrim—the Crown Heights Shomrim—often meant that the shit was about to hit the fan.

"Out," he said now to Lifshitz.

"Kiss my ass," Lifshitz said.

"Please—"

"Kiss my ass."

Lifshitz pulled a Motorola shortwave radio from his belt. The radio spluttered; Lifshitz shouted back some instructions in a mixture of Yiddish and English. He was calling in reinforcements, Gur knew.

Gur had seconds to set this thing right before the rest of the squad arrived. He crab-walked over to Yossi Frankel, the second of the two Shomrim boys, and held his hand toward the ceiling to show that he meant no harm. "Yossi," he said in English. "This is not your problem."

"We're just trying to get things under control."

"There's nothing to get under control. It's over."

Frankel dropped his chin a little, and for a moment, Gur thought he'd finally gotten through to Frankel—that maybe the Shomrim would turn their backs and leave. But then the door opened again, and everything went white.

Modern Hasidism, which has its roots in eighteenth-century Europe, comprises a very loosely confederated group of courts, each led by a rebbe, or grand rabbi. Generally speaking, a court takes its name from its village of origin: the Satmar Hasidim come from Szatmár, in modern-day Hungary, the Lubavitchers from Lyubavichi, in Russia. All Hasidim—the "pious ones" in Hebrew—share a strict allegiance to the dictates of traditional Jewish law. Their lives are circumscribed by prayer, study, familial obligation, and a deep commitment to their rebbe. Every court maintains a central shul—a large and accessible synagogue where the rebbe can speak to his Hasidim. Ground Zero for the Lubavitch movement has long been the shul at 770 Eastern Parkway, a stately brick building divided into offices and prayer rooms on the first and second floors and a partitioned synagogue—with a smaller area reserved for women and the larger for the men—in the basement.

On the evening of December 27, 2007, the bochur Noach Beliniski was slumped at a table in the basement shul, his eyelids lowering, his hands heavy and inert at his sides. Like Gur, Beliniski had spent most of the day in prayer, but when the rest of the bochurim headed back to the dormitory, he'd begged off and returned to shul. The way Beliniski saw it, there was no time for rest. Not when the age of Moshiach was at hand. In two years, Beliniski, tall and blond and shaped like an understuffed scarecrow, would find a wife from a well-connected Lubavitch family, perhaps with the help of a professional matchmaker. He would follow the familiar and furrowed path of the thousands of Lubavitch men who had come before him: the outreach work in the field, the rapidly growing family, the regular visits back to Brooklyn, to pay homage to the memory of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late rebbe of Lubavitch.

Beliniski had heard from other bochurim that the shul had once belonged to a prominent secular Jewish doctor, who had performed illegal abortions in the same chambers that now belonged to the Lubavitch rabbinical leadership. Who knew what the basement—the room in which he now sat—had been used for. The chamber was long, not particularly wide, and harshly lit. It reminded Beliniski of an operating theater. The light turned your skin translucent; if you looked closely enough, you could see the slow pulse of blue blood through your veins. Above Beliniski was the mezzanine floor, where women could daven, separated from the men by a wall of Plexiglas. Outsiders frequently complained that women were second-class citizens in Lubavitch life, but as far as most Lubavitchers were concerned, the barrier was a boon to both genders: women were out of view of the men, and the men, free from distraction, could concentrate on the holy work at hand.

On Friday nights, the shul might hold a thousand men or more—a writhing, gesticulating, davening ocean of black suits and black hats and upraised hands. But by 9 p.m. on a Saturday, the crowd had begun to thin. Four boys gathered around the chair—now covered by a throw—where the rebbe had once sat for hours on end, discussing philosophy with his Hasidim. Beliniski stood up and shook the life back into his knees, his long shins, his feet. He was halfway to the other bochurim, his hand outstretched in greeting, when he heard someone call his name.

Maybe the voice belonged to someone Beliniski knew well. Maybe it didn't. At any rate, in his testimony before the Brooklyn Supreme Court, in the fall of 2009, Beliniski never gave the name of the messenger who had been sent from 749 to fetch him. Only the nature of the message: the Shomrim were coming. The kid might as well have been Paul Revere. The Shomrim are coming!

Beliniski, who normally had all the grace of an adolescent giraffe, nevertheless could move when he needed to, and now he was moving fast, past the benches, past the rebbe's chair, the tails of his coat flapping behind him, his hand clasping his black fedora—and the yarmulke underneath—to his hand. First stop: the locker. Because the bochurim spent so much of their day in the shul—twelve-hour shifts were not unheard of—many of the boys kept their belongings and changes of clothes in lockers on the north side of the shul. Beliniski's was full of the normal clutter: pads of paper and prayer books, moldy sandwiches and flat soda and pictures of home.

And a video camera. Beliniski was no fool. He, too, had been present at the riot of 2006, when the Shomrim and the bochurim had first faced off. He'd seen a friend throttled, had seen some meshugeh idiot pick up a heavy wooden bench over his head and contemplate an act that might have resulted in decapitation. Beliniski was there when the ambulance arrived, when the goy cops paraded—bareheaded—through the holy shul as if it were their living room.

Since then, Beliniski had the distinct sense that he and his friends were being hunted. He saw the three-wheeled Shomrim carts on every corner, watched the Shomrim boys roll by in their cars, the windows down, with their middle fingers extended. It was considered a grave sin to rat out a fellow Jew—an act, Beliniski had been told, once punishable by death—but at some point, you had to look out for yourself.

Beliniski shouldered the camera and stepped out of the shul, shivering in the sharp cold. The rumpled ribbon of Eastern Parkway opened before him, sliding west toward Park Slope and east into Brownsville. The stars in Brooklyn are infinitesimally small, a fact noted regularly by out-of-towners and almost never by native Crown Heights kids, who didn't know any better—who had in some cases had never been beyond Queens. By comparison, Beliniski was positively worldly. He knew that the glow of the row houses was no substitute for the natural light of the desert at sunset. He understood that the pools of milky yellow light cast by the streetlights were nothing compared to a big fat country moon.

He ran across the access road and the six lanes of traffic, ignoring the car horns that rose and fell in his wake. He ran as if he were on stilts. As if the world depended on it. Pausing for a moment at the front door of the dormitory, Beliniski double-checked the tape, cued up the camera, filled his lungs with grimy city air, and dashed up the stairwell toward Room 107.

Q: Describe the people you saw inside Room 107.

A: Outside I saw people, then I went inside.

Q: When you went inside.

A: I went through the door and I saw the policemen, people in uniform and my friends, my colleagues.

If you believed the testimony he gave two years later—and neither the jury nor Judge Albert Tomei found any immediate reason not to—Gavriel Braunstein was unfamiliar with the Shomrim Rescue Patrol before the evening of December 29, 2007. He couldn't have identified any of the members if his life depended on it. On entering Room 107, Braunstein, a stocky twenty-five-year-old, saw seven men in navy blue uniforms and thought, Police.

He saw Shuki Gur, his old friend from Israel, knotted up in the center of the room, his hands outstretched, his face impossibly red, his throat muscles stretched like old rope. He saw tall, skeletal Noach Beliniski, swaying with the movement of the crowd, a camera slung over his shoulder. He saw faces illuminated by the sharp and frightening white light of the camera. He saw thirty bodies, sixty elbows, sixty knee bones. He saw two men who appeared to be paralyzed with fright.

Q: And when you got to Room 107, what did you see?

A: I saw many people, chaos, confusion.

Q: Chaos?

A: Tumult.

Gavriel Braunstein—former rabbinical student, current rabbi, alleged victim, exceptionally useful witness. For most of the night, Braunstein had been buried in his books. But unfortunately for Braunstein, his window looked over the same air shaft as Room 107. By 9 p.m., study had become all but impossible. So he found a shirt in the closet, adjusted his thick, tangled brown hair in front of the mirror, edged his glasses up his nose with one finger, and pulled on his suit jacket. Just as each Hasidic court has its own cultural and religious customs, which have been passed down from generation to generation, so, too, do many Hasidic courts maintain an informal—and unmandated—sartorial tradition.

The members of the Ger court, for example, wear tall fur hats called spodiks, while Satmar Hasids favor rounded bowler-type hats. In dress situations—work, prayer, the shabbos—Lubavitch men sport black fedoras and simple business suits, an homage to their Seventh Rebbe, who wore the same thing. Braunstein, being a bochur and required at all times to represent his yeshiva and his religion, never left his room without his suit jacket. It was a matter of dignity. Now he buttoned the jacket tightly around his midsection—right over left, always, as the Kabbalah proscribes—and checked the tack of his tzitzis, the white fringes of his ritual undergarment. Speak to the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes on the borders of their garments throughout their generations. He knew the commandment by heart.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Among Righteous Menby Matthew Shaer Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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