The Rev. Al Sharpton, on a journey that he described as a stopover in hell, came to Israel today to serve a legal summons on a young Hasidic Jew who was a central figure in the racial violence in Crown Heights last month.
Mr. Sharpton did not find his man, but then he did not have much time. He wound up staying in the country for only about three hours, dropping off his legal papers at the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv before flying off to Frankfurt.
Had he stayed much longer, he would have found himself essentially unable to move because Ben-Gurion International Airport shut down this evening for 25 hours for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Mr. Sharpton was accompanied by Alton H. Maddox Jr., the New York lawyer who has been a leader in black protests in Crown Heights. A Court Summons
Mr. Sharpton said they had come to hand a court summons to Yosef Lifsh, a 22-year-old member of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect, who was driving a car that struck and killed a 7-year-old black child, Gavin Cato, in Crown Heights on Aug. 19. In apparent retaliation, a Hasidic rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, was stabbed to death a few hours later amid mounting racial tension in that part of Brooklyn.
As a representative of the Cato family, Mr. Sharpton traveled here to hand Mr. Lifsh a summons requiring him to give a deposition in New York on Friday in a wrongful-death civil lawsuit filed by the boy's family.
Mr. Lifsh's family lives in Kfar Habad, a predominantly Lubavitch town southeast of Tel Aviv, and he reportedly returned there last week after a Brooklyn grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing in the death of the boy. Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Maddox made no attempt to go to Kfar Habad.
Witnesses at the airport said that as Mr. Sharpton looked for a taxi to take him to Tel Aviv, a few people yelled at him, including several Orthodox Jews.
"Go to hell," one woman shouted.
"I already am in hell," Mr. Sharpton replied, according to The Associated Press. Then, he went on to say that he was referring to the airport.
