“I didn’t care how quickly it happened, I was thinking about the future. I wanted it for posterity so that Ari should be remembered every single minute and every single day.”
Dedicated in memory of Ari Halberstam Hy’’d
WHO WAS ARI HALBERSTAM?
Ari Halberstam was a 16-year-old Lubavitcher chassid who was shot in cold blood on 23 Adar/March 1, 1994 by an Arab murderer looking for revenge against the Jews and finding his target — a van full of bochurim escorting the Rebbe back to Crown Heights.
The previous Friday, a Lebanese jihadist named Rashid Baz had attended a raging anti-Semitic sermon in a Brooklyn mosque, on the heels of escalating tensions in Israel, which had been hit by a spate of terror attacks. (Witnesses reported that he shouted “Kill the Jews,” a call for revenge for the shooting spree in the Mearas Hamachpeilah by Dr. Baruch Goldstein the previous week, in which 29 Muslims were killed.) By Tuesday morning, his plan was laid out: his target would be the figure he saw as the leader of the Jews — the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Because of the volatile situation and residual tensions from the 1991 Crown Heights race riots (and a rumor that the Rebbe had been the target of a previous assassination attempt), a police car was stationed around the clock outside Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, where the 92-year-old ailing Rebbe had been living since his stroke two years prior. That morning he was due to have cataract surgery at the Manhattan Ear, Eye, and Throat hospital, and as a police security precaution, the route the Rebbe’s ambulance and police escort took remained undisclosed, while the accompanying chassidim were instructed to take a different route.
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