Ambassadors’ Wives Visit Brooklyn

By COLlive reporter
Photos: Shmuel Amit/COLlive

Wives of ambassadors stationed at the United Nations recently spent a day touring the borough of Brooklyn in New York. They ended their trip with an emotional visit to the Jewish Children’s Museum.

The 45 women included wives of ambassadors from different countries such as Albania, Singapore, Pakistan, Russia, Germany, Egypt and many others.

It was organized by the group Women for Women and stopped at many of the borough’s sights, such as the Manhattan Beach Boardwalk, the famed brownstones, and finally, a special tour of the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights.

The museum was built 12 years ago in memory of Ari Halberstam, killed by terrorist Rashid Baz on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994.

Ari’s mother and the museum’s founder Devorah Halberstam welcomed the guests and described the hands-on, high-tech lessons about Jewish life and heritage that the museum showcases to people of all nationalities and walks of life.

Over a luncheon catered by Mendy’s Restaurant, Halberstam said over 2 million people have visited the museum since its opening.

Halberstam vividly retold the events of the murder of her son that shook not only herself, her family, and community, but foreshadowed the rise of terrorism in the United States and around the world.

Speaking emotionally, Halberstam related how her son, the eldest of her 5 children and a typical Chabad teenager, was also close like a son to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka. Her son, Halberstam described, loved typical activities, like basketball and being with his friends.

On that fateful day when he joined a group of Yeshiva students to pray outside the Manhattan hospital where the Lubavitcher Rebbe was having minor surgery, he had no idea of the events unfolding across the world, Halberstam related.

“My son had no idea, that in Hebron, a man named Boruch Goldstein had shot up a mosque and killed 29 Arabs. There was a lot of anger, and people were calling for revenge. Ari’s whole world was this 4 block radius in Crown Heights,” Halberstam said, pointing out that she lived on the same block as the Museum.

In great detail, Halberstam related the events of the day of the murder, how Baz followed the Rebbe’s motorcade as it drove towards the Brooklyn Bridge, firing 40 shots from an Uzi machine-gun set on automatic and other weapons, into the van transporting the students, killing Ari and injuring 3 others.

Halberstam told the group that she spent years studying the events, becoming an expert on terrorism in the process.

It took years to convince the FBI to classify Ari’s murder as a terrorist attack, Halberstam related, but something she finally achieved after years of work.

The lesson, she said, especially to women, is to never give up. Each must effect change in their lives, wherever they may find themselves.

“We only get one chance in this world. You can’t relive your life, you can’t say ‘I’ll do it later,'” she said. “I had to make a decision on what to do in my life to make a difference,” Halberstam said. “You need to make the difference wherever you are.”

“If there’s anything I have learned from the death of my child, whose life was cut short, is that he’s not only my child. He represents every child in this universe. My son is your child too,” Halberstam said.