By Kelly Boyce
Monica Parfait, a 16-year-old immigrant from Haiti who attends Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, had never met any member of the neighborhood’s large Jewish population until Herb Weitz. A secular Jew aged 76, Weitz entertained Monica with stories of his rebellious childhood, telling her how he and his friends used to skip classes at their Jewish school to go to the black schools and start fights. “From what I heard from his stories, it’s like Jewish gangsters,” Monica said. “It was things I did not expect from Jewish kids.”
Weitz told Monica that the Hasidic Jews hadn’t yet moved into Crown Heights when he was a child, and despite the schoolyard scraps, the Jewish and black students usually got along well. “After school they would hang out together,” Monica recalled him saying. “You would not see the black kids playing with the Jewish kids today, but back then, it was not like that.”
Weitz also told Monica he presently has a 26-year-old girlfriend. “I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever heard,” Monica said. “I just started laughing and I couldn’t stop myself. I said, ‘How old are you, if I may ask?’”
Monica’s discussions with Weitz resulted from her involvement in the Crown Heights Oral History Project, directed by Alex Kelly and conducted with students from Paul Robeson. Kelly had lived in Crown Heights off and on for a few years but had never been invested or involved in the community. When she moved back this fall, she decided to “commit to this neighborhood” by arranging an activity that combined the youth and enthusiasm of area high-school students with the wisdom of older community residents.
Having previously worked for StoryCorps, an organization devoted to compiling oral histories for public radio and the Library of Congress, Kelly firmly believed in the power of personal narrative, both for the interviewer and the subject. When she led a project in Maine, in which high-school students interviewed homeless persons, she saw that the teenagers not only learned interviewing techniques, but more importantly developed empathy for those they interviewed.
“I wanted to create a project for myself based around this community, and indulge my own curiosity and build on the curiosity of high-school students who live here,” Kelly said. To that end, she organized an oral-history project with Paul Robeson pupils, with the goal of presenting their work at a community listening event on June 9 at the Brooklyn LaunchPad, and donating the transcript archives to community organizations, which was done on August 6.
Kelly worked with the Crown Heights Youth Collective and Brooklyn College Community Partnership, which chose five student leaders from Paul Robeson for the internships. “The students I was working with in my internship were the best and the brightest,” Kelly said. She and the students each conducted the interviews, some as group interviews, and some one-on-one.
Treverlyn DeHaarte, a 16-year-old junior at Paul Robeson, moved to Crown Heights from Guyana two years ago, and enjoyed hearing stories of community residents. “I learned how important it is to listen to what the person has to say,” she said. “Not only my opinion counts, the other person counts, too.”
The students interviewed 15 Afro-Caribbean, 6 Jewish, and 24 African-American residents of Crown Heights. These numbers do not represent an exhaustive accounting of Crown Heights residents, Kelly said, but rather a starting point for the community itself to build on. “It’s not a package, more of an open, ever-expanding dialogue that I’d like other people to jump into,” Kelly said. “I’ve told all the people who have accepted these archives that there could be more ongoing conversations.”
A balanced history was important to Kelly and she wanted to make sure she and the students recruited and interviewed people from both the Jewish and black communities. She had met with the Crow Hill Community Association and had many contacts in the black communities, and all five student interns are black, but Kelly wasn’t working with any organizations representing the Hasidic Jewish community. This imbalance was a concern, because the neighborhood has had racial tension between the Jewish and black communities, manifested in the Crown Heights riot of 1991, beginning when a Hasidic rabbi’s car struck and killed a Guyanese child. The resulting riots lasted three days, and an Orthodox Jew was killed. Out of the riots, however, a coalition was established to create dialogue between the black and Jewish communities. Kelly contacted the Crown Heights Mediation Center, which grew out of the coalition, who told her about some leaders in the Hasidic Jewish community she could speak with.
Arne Lipkind, community liaison and event specialist, was the first Hasidic Jew to be interviewed by the students. “It was my first time meeting a strictly religious Jewish person,” Ansie Montilus, an 18-year-old immigrant from Haiti, and another student involved in the project, said of Lipkind. “I had learned about them in school but had never met anyone.”
Another Hasidic Jewish woman taught the students much about Hasidic Jews. She explained about the Jewish holidays, and the students asked her questions about practices they had heard about Hasidic Jews, such as if married women were required to wear wigs. “She showed us the wig,” Monica said. “She said it’s not a must that you cut off your hair, but it’s a must that you wear a wig.”
The woman even offered to show the students her synagogue, a gesture they especially appreciated. “I always thought they didn’t want to have anything to do with the black community, that they look down on us, but that’s not really true,” Monica said. “They want to work with us. I heard the Jews wouldn’t invite us to a synagogue, but she did.”
In preparing for the project, Kelly and the students studied a previous Crown Heights oral history project, called Crown Heights Oral History – Bridging Eastern Parkway, which was undertaken by the Brooklyn Historical Society in 1993 – 1994. Although that oral history was more comprehensive than the one Kelly planned for her high-school students, Kelly felt that her own project offered something different by having young people interview older people.
Sady Sullivan, director of oral history at the Brooklyn Historical Society, agreed, saying that the project is ” a great way to connect youth with elders.” Sullivan also said, “It’s great to have a present-day oral history project based in Crown Heights to compare with the 20-year-old Crown Heights Oral History project to see what has changed in the two decades.”
The students valued the opportunity to interview older residents and noted the positive outlook, regardless of any cultural or age difference, that the interviewees all seemed to share for the future of the neighborhood. “At the end of the day,” Monica said, “they all want Crown Heights to be a better place.”
About 110 people attended the community listening event, and Kelly was overwhelmed with people thanking her for organizing the project. “Oral history can actively engage communities, it doesn’t sit on a shelf in a stodgy space,” Kelly said. “It can actually make a statement.”
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