Racial Animosity Is Deep in Troubled Brooklyn Area : Violence: Blacks see Jews as trying to push them out and are, in turn, seen as source of crime, social problems.

It is a neighborhood of broad, tree-lined avenues, imposing old mansions, aging brownstone row houses and time-worn apartment buildings.

Once, it was a showcase Brooklyn community that was largely middle-income and Jewish; now, it is a faded remnant of itself that is predominantly low-income and black.

This is Crown Heights, where residents would like outsiders to believe that they live together in peace and harmony. But, this week, turmoil has raged here. One man was killed and more than 100 people were injured, including 84 policemen, in the last four days as the racial, religious and cultural differences roared into conflict.

An overwhelming number of the Jewish residents are members of an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect known as the Lubavitchers, who make up about 10% of Crown Height’s total 30,000 population.

Members of the tight-knit community, whose dark garb and strict observance of traditional Jewish law have their roots in Eastern European 18th-Century villages, are often perceived by blacks as “outsiders” who despise them and are trying to take the neighborhood away from them.

Black residents have charged that the Lubavitchers are trying to intimidate them into selling their homes and that the private neighborhood security patrol the Hasidic sect runs treats any black like a criminal suspect. Blacks maintain also that the police department and other city agencies give the Hasidic community preferential treatment and privileges.

The Lubavitchers, meanwhile, maintain that they are a simple people, trying hard to live their lives according to their religious beliefs. Many contend that blacks are the major source of the crime and other social problems that make the neighborhood so dangerous. Some deplore what they see as a pervasive lack of discipline, order and purpose in black family and community life.

So, when a 7-year-old black child was accidentally killed by a car driven by a Lubavitcher last Monday, what happened next came as no surprise to those familiar with the racial dynamics of this unusual neighborhood.

A protest by blacks, charging that the child did not receive medical aid quickly enough, turned violent. Roving mobs pummeled whites and shouted anti-Semitic epithets. The one death was that of a 29-year-old Australian Jew who was attacked with knives.

The neighborhood is now littered with broken bottles and bricks. The hulks of smashed or burned-out cars and vans blot the streets.

On Thursday, Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown threatened mass arrests of demonstrators if the fighting continues, and police saturated the neighborhood with officers. “We cannot, we will not tolerate lawlessness,” he told reporters. More than 60 arrests have been made since Monday.

Mayor David N. Dinkins visited the neighborhood Thursday, for a third time, to appeal for calm. But black protesters, who on a previous visit jeered the city’s first black mayor and threw bottles at his car, seemed no more receptive to his advice this time.

“The black feeling is that the mayor is pro-Jewish and that he’s only doing his number for Jews,” said Andrew W. Cooper, publisher of the City Sun, a Brooklyn-based black weekly newspaper. “Black people remember how he stood up on election night and credited the Jews with his election . . . . They are not happy with this man.”

Many Jews in Crown Heights also are unhappy with the mayor, contending that he is not doing enough to protect the Hasidic community. Jewish community leaders met Thursday to press their demands for more police protection.

“Dinkins is allowing the irresponsible black leadership to make horrendous statements,” said Shalom Horowitz, who has compared the rioting and the damage to Jewish shops and homes to the so-called Kristallnacht rampage by Nazis in Germany in 1938 that left Jewish businesses and residences a shambles. “We were voting for him before. We will never vote for him again.”

The Jewish-black tensions have “been simmering for a number of years,” said Cooper. “The resentments are there. They are not hidden. You can almost feel them walking through the streets.”

The black population of Crown Heights began growing rapidly in the 1960s and ‘70s, particularly with an influx of black West Indians from Haiti, Grenada, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad.

As blacks moved in, whites moved out. Now, blacks make up about 80% of the population. The Lubavitchers, who first started settling here in the 1940s and ‘50s and made this neighborhood their worldwide headquarters, were among the small minority of whites who remained after the white exodus.

In recent years, more Jewish immigrants have settled in the neighborhood, adding to the Hasidic population and contributing to an impression among some blacks that outsiders are moving in.

Beginning in the ‘70s, mounting tensions between the Hasidic sect and blacks became a commonplace feature of life in the neighborhood.

In 1978, racial passions were inflamed when two men in Hasidic dress allegedly attacked a young black. Two rabbis were later acquitted in the incident.

In 1987, a snowball fight between blacks and Jews turned into a pitched battle, with both sides hurling stones and bottles.

“They have such a venomous hatred for us,” said Ronnie Bowens, a black man in his 20s who has taken part in the recent stone-and-bottle-throwing protests. “Since they’ve been here, the only thing they’re doing is persecuting us. We didn’t have the word slumlords until the Jews came on the scene.”

One of the most racially polarizing incidents occurred in February, 1987, when a black woman’s house was set afire early one morning from a can of petroleum placed in the basement.

A witness said he had seen two men, one dressed in a blue coat and the other dressed in a long black coat and fedora--the typical garb of a Hasidic Jew--run from behind the house to the basement of a dormitory at a nearby Hasidic school.

Blacks not only saw the firebombing as part of the efforts to move them out of the neighborhood, they viewed it as another case of the special treatment that they contend police give the Hasidim.

No one was ever charged in the incident. Police said that they could not make an identification.

Hasidic community leaders have denied that there is any effort on the part of Jews to displace blacks from their homes.

They concede that the police may seem to favor them at times. But, they argue, it is only because the police know that they have nothing to fear from them but do from blacks.

Crown Heights is one of the most dangerous precincts in New York, with 36 murders, 86 rapes, 860 assaults, 1,078 robberies and 2,099 burglaries recorded last year, according to police statistics.

“When the police see this hat and this face,” said one Lubavitcher in a traditional dark fedora and suit who refused to give his name, “they think, ‘Very nice people, very good.’ They don’t look on me as a criminal. But, when they see the black people, they don’t know if they are so good.”

In a 1988 incident, anger spread through the Hasidic community after a Jewish man’s face was slashed by a black man wielding a razor. Hundreds of Lubavitchers gathered at a synagogue on Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights’ main thoroughfare, to demand increased police protection for their people.

It was a combination of the widespread feelings among blacks that they are denigrated by Jews and that the police give the Hasidim preferential treatment that sparked the four days of protests and rioting that began Monday.

The car that killed young Gavin Cato and critically injured his 7-year-old cousin, Angela Cato, was one of several automobiles that were bringing Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, spiritual leader of the Lubavitcher sect, and his entourage home from a visit to his wife’s grave site.

As is usual when Schneerson travels by auto, an unmarked police car was escorting the motorcade. Police say that this is a protection afforded the Hasidic leader because of his status as an international religious figure.

But, after the accident occurred, rumors flew through the black community that ambulance rescue squads ignored the black children and tended to the driver and his passenger first. Authorities have since said there are no grounds for those accusations, but many blacks remain unconvinced.

Audrey Britton of The Times New York bureau contributed to this story.