The faithful of Borough Park have a saying: “We are all of one face.” The life of Levi Aron, the outcast awaiting trial for the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, suggests otherwise.
Levi Aron
New York Magazine has a long article on the Leiby Kletzky killing by Matthew Shaer, who just wrote a book on the Shomrim/Shmira battle in Crown Heights.
Here are a few brief excerpts. Any comments in square brakets are mine:
…Now German was about to clash with the Shomrim again. The search coordinators, German remembers, were casting a wide net. To him this made little sense. “I tried to think logically. Like a detective,” he says. “I thought, Well, we have to go to the last point he was seen alive.” But the Shomrim were unyielding. After a few minutes, German threw up his arms. “I knew I’d have to do it myself.”…
…“This is a very simple case,” [Levi Aron's newest attorney Howard Greenberg] said. “Levi Aron is either evil or he’s crazy.” He went on to suggest that investigators had coerced Aron into writing the confession, which Greenberg contended was filled with “police Mandarin.” “My opinion,” he added, “is that you can get this guy to admit he shot Kennedy if you spend a little bit of time with him.”
The defense team, Greenberg told me last week, plans to demonstrate that Aron suffered a brain injury during his boyhood bike accident and that his injury, coupled with a familial history of mental illness, at some point led to what he described as “an acute schizophrenic break.” “You can quote me on this,” he said. “I will quit the practice of criminal law if Levi Aron is not found insane.”…
…New York’s Orthodox neighborhoods, founded by émigrés who had weathered persecution and anti-Semitism in their home countries, were set up to be self-sufficient and largely self-governing: There are the Shomrim patrols, so that the enclaves can police themselves [these actually were not started until the the 1970s, long after there were Orthodox, haredi or hasidic neighborhoods in New York City’s five boroughs; they were started in response to the rising crime rate and the decaying police response as the city crumbled during the recessions of the late 1970s], the Hatzolah ambulance units to ferry Jewish residents to and from the hospital [the first started in the late 1960s as FDNY response times lagged after racial unrest and economic woes rocked the city], and the beit din, or rabbinical court, to adjudicate disputes. In places like Crown Heights, where the Hasidic population is in more regular contact with outsiders and children are more likely to learn English from an early age, the walls built by such measures have begun to crumble. In Borough Park, they have remained imposing. [Levi Aron’s newest attorney Howard] Greenberg’s legalistic distinction—that Aron cannot be both crazy and evil, and that if he is crazy then he cannot be guilty—is not in line with how the neighborhood sees the world.
“This is our 9/11,” many residents of Borough Park told me in the weeks after Aron was apprehended. There is a new sense of vulnerability in the neighborhood, an unease that will not fade, assumptions that have been shattered. “We’ve learned that a monster is a monster. And monsters come in all shapes and sizes,” Zvi Gluck, another NYPD liaison [who lives in Queens], says. “It’s not, ‘Oh, he’s Jewish, he must be okay.’ I think we need to know that there are bad people out there, in every walk of life.”…