On March 1, 1994, a gunman in a car opened fire on a van carrying more than a dozen Hasidic students as it began to cross the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, critically wounding two young men and injuring two others.
The lone gunman, driving a blue Chevrolet Caprice equipped with a submachine gun, two 9mm guns, and a “street sweeper” shotgun, pursued the van full of terrified students across the bridge.
He fired in three separate bursts, spraying both sides of the van. He then disappeared into traffic as the van came to a stop at the Brooklyn end of the bridge.
The injured Yeshiva students were among dozens who were returning from a Manhattan hospital where the spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, had undergone minor surgery.
The attack occurred less than a week after the massacre of Muslims by a Brooklyn-born Jewish settler in the West Bank. The shooting began at 10:24 A.M. on the ramp that leads from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge.
The van that was fired on, a white Dodge Ram 350 carrying 15 students, was one of perhaps 20 vehicles en route back to Crown Heights from Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital, where Rabbi Schneerson was being treated.
Initially, the gunman followed the Rebbe’s entourage to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. When he found that it was closed to other vehicular traffic, he reversed his course and traveled north to the Brooklyn Bridge.
When the gunman saw the students garbed in their Hasidic dress, he immediately opened fire. In the first burst of gunfire, the gunman strafed the passenger side of the van, striking three of the students and blowing out the rear windows.
The van came to a stop, and two of the students stumbled out as the driver and the others attempted to see if anyone had been hit. Gunfire then erupted again from the blue four-door Chevrolet, this time raking the driver’s side.
The driver of the van then sped off toward Brooklyn, leaving the two students on the bridge. They were later picked up by an emergency medical technician. The gunman followed the fleeing van with shouts of “Kill the Jews,” hailed in Arabic.
He once more fired shots at the passenger side of the vehicle before it swerved off the bridge at the Cadman Plaza exit. The van, with at least six bullet holes in its body and windows destroyed, finally came to a halt at the Brooklyn entrance to the bridge.
The Wounded
All the shooting victims were immediately rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital. The most severe of the wounded was 16-year-old Ari Halberstam obm who was shot in the head. He suffered from profound brain injuries and died five days later.
Read more at Ari Halberstam Memorial Site
The murdering Arab Rashid Baz Yimach Shmo V’zichro.
created from murderous, senseless brutality. The world lost a special person way too early. An example of the result of poisonous education and theology – which is any theology that espouses one person’s superiority and right to live as they respectfully wish, over another. “The living shall apply this to their heart” seems to be the only constructive take away from such an act and result. Pleased do not educate your young of a truth that speaks of anything similar to that which helped create the mindset of the monstrous murderer. Please educate your young (and yourself) to believe and… Read more »
this terrorist knew what he was going after…he shot that van because he was following the Rebbe’s ambulance, he wanted to kill the Rebbe but he couldn’t so he killed one of his chossidim, who were part of the entourage, instead.
Due to the dedication and perseverance of his wonderful mother, Devorah Halberstam, he will be remembered always for good. May his family find comfort and the zchus of the Jewish Children’s Museum named after him.