Brooklyn Moms Hold Private Peace Talks

It is simple. They talk about anything that comes to mind: dress sizes, doctors, recipes and religion.

But it is also complex. The group is made up of 20 Caribbean American and Hasidic women who live in Crown Heights, just across the East River in Brooklyn, where blacks and Jews live side by side, not always peacefully. These women call themselves Mothers to Mothers. For five years, they have been meeting once a month.

They meet to make peace. In August 1991, Crown Heights erupted in bloody rioting after a car driven by a Hasidic man accidentally killed a 7-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato. Angry black people roamed the 50-square-block neighborhood, destroying Jewish businesses, assaulting Hasidim and shouting “Heil Hitler!” About 20 people pounced on Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish student, and stabbed him to death.

The meetings began with a chance encounter a month later between two women at the corner of Utica and President streets, which had been the very center of the rioting. The women were Henna White, 37, a Hasidic whose best friend had been molested and fatally stabbed by a Caribbean American man, and Jean Griffith Sandiford, 54, whose son had been chased in an earlier incident by a pack of bat-wielding whites onto a freeway, where he was hit by a car and died.

They began to talk. Together, the two women decided to do something so their families would be safe.

They knew they were setting themselves a difficult task. “Even though we live together,” White says, “we live such separate lives.” They started with a meeting of mothers on neutral ground: the waiting room at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. They wanted a small group so all the women could speak. They brought children, cookies and sodas.

The black women asked the Hasidic women about their wigs, and the Hasidic women asked the black women about the differences between their Christian churches. They discussed the Holocaust. One black woman described what it was like to grow up in the South. Another explained to the Hasidic women that black children stare at them not because they plan to hurt them but because they simply do not understand them.

No question was forbidden, and each one was answered.

After Nelson Limrick was acquitted in criminal court for the death of Rosenbaum, Henna White brought to the meeting a Hasidic woman who had been forced to lie on her apartment floor during the riots in which Rosenbaum died, holding her children, as rocks flew through her windows.

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Her anger and fear sparked the anger and fear of the others. The black and Jewish women took sides and argued.

Then Sandiford said quietly: “We have to get along.”

If a mother whose son had been killed could say this, how could the others not feel the same way?

Suddenly, they felt each other’s pain. The women hugged.

“We walked away feeling good,” remembers Ann Lancaster, 52, a member of the group.

Today there is peace in Crown Heights, in no small part because of Mothers to Mothers.

Mothers to Mothers “has had a significant impact on lowering tensions,” says Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney. “The fact that these two groups of people, who are very different, can engage one another for as long as they have and glory in their commonality, while recognizing the importance of differences, is a wonderful grass-roots initiative.”

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Mothers to Mothers had its annual barbecue the other day. Until this year, it had kept meetings private. Now, with help from the Anti-Defamation League, it has gone public.

“In extraordinary times,” says Lynne Posner, 49, “ordinary acts become extraordinary. It’s a very natural, ordinary act that we do. The point is that it becomes extraordinary because of what is going on around us.”

In the fall, Mothers to Mothers plans to expand.

Each of the women will lead an interracial discussion group of her own. The women want to speak to college students and prisoners. They want to share what they have learned: Ignorance breeds fear, and that is the crux of prejudice.