Rabbi Shmuel Butman, who was the public face of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect during the antisemitic riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 and literally a keeper of that ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement’s flame by illuminating its menorah — billed as the world’s largest — across from Central Park every Hanukkah for decades, died on July 22 in Manhattan. He was 81.
His death, at a hospital, was announced on the Chabad-Lubavitch community website, which said he had been experiencing heart problems.
Rabbi Butman, as executive director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization at the time, became the spokesman for his tight-knit ultra-Orthodox community in Crown Heights after Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar visiting from Australia, was stabbed to death by a mob of Black youths hours after a 7-year-old Black boy, Gavin Cato, was struck and killed by a car in the Lubavitch Grand Rabbi’s motorcade on Aug. 19, 1991.
The deaths set off four days of unrest between Black residents and Jews in racially-mixed Crown Heights, home of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s world headquarters. Mainstream Jewish organizations condemned the looting, vandalism, threats and physical violence that followed, but they initially stopped short of accusing the rioters of antisemitism.
Black residents said they were protesting what they perceived as preferential treatment accorded to the Hasidim by the police. They further contended that paramedics who had responded to the car accident had paid more attention to the Hasidic people in the car than to Gavin and one of his cousins, also 7, who was injured. Yosef Lifsh, the driver of the vehicle that struck and killed Gavin, was not charged.
Rabbi Butman sought to diffuse tensions and urged peaceful coexistence in an appeal to a receptive crowd at the annual West Indian American Day parade in Brooklyn two weeks later. But he insisted that the rioting, which terrified the Hasidim who lived in Crown Heights, was motivated by hatred of Jews.
“What happened in Crown Heights was not an isolated incident,” he said at a rally joined by leaders of other Jewish organizations in October 1991. “It was part of a planned pogrom that was instigated by outsiders. When we Hasidim are attacked, we represent all of you: every single Jew.”
The “outsiders,” he said, were “preachers without pulpits and lawyers without clients.”
Nearly a year later, he said, “We are not interested in heightening the tensions.” He added, “There is only one way to exist — peacefully.”
“But first and foremost,” he continued, “we must be sensitive to the needs of the Hasidic community. It is 13 months since the murder, and only one person has been brought to trial. We hope that this trial will be the beginning of bringing people to justice.”
In 2003, Lemrick Nelson Jr. — who was tried three times in the stabbing of Mr. Rosenbaum with a knife — admitted guilt during his third trial. A jury convicted Mr. Nelson, who was 16 when the crime occurred, of violating Mr. Rosenbaum’s civil rights, but it found that prosecutors had not proved that he had caused the death. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, including time already served for an overturned conviction, and released in 2004.
Every Hanukkah for decades, Rabbi Butman represented the Lubavitch movement and “raised the Jewish profile in New York and beyond,” the organization said, by mounting a cherry picker to light a 32-foot-tall, two-ton menorah, which he helped commission, in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, at the southeast corner of Central Park on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.
Joined by a buoyant crowd, Rabbi Butman would typically end the ceremony on each of the eight nights by proclaiming, “May the lights of the Hanukkah menorah that everyone is putting up throughout the world usher in the eternal lights of Moshiach and the great redemption for all.”
By the early 1990s, Rabbi Butman was a fervid leader of a growing faction intent on anointing the Grand Rabbi, Menachem M. Schneerson, as the Moschiach, or Jewish Messiah.
But by 1993 he was compelled to compromise with a more moderate group close to Rabbi Schneerson. When Rabbi Schneerson, who had suffered a stroke and was unable to speak, appeared publicly on a balcony at the movement’s headquarters, even Rabbi Butman acknowledged that the occasion, which the movement had billed as a messianic event, was in fact simply meant to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of Rabbi Schneerson’s ascent as the seventh Grand Rabbi of Lubavitch.
“This is not a coronation,” Rabbi Butman said at the time. “No human being has the power to anoint the Messiah. The only one that has the power is the Almighty. All that we can do is cry out to God that he will send the Messiah to usher in a new world and a better world for all mankind.”
Rabbi Schneerson died in 1994 without designating a successor. The next year, Rabbi Butman wrote, “We must now redouble our efforts to continue and expand the Moshiach Campaign throughout the world until we will realize very speedily the completion of the great Redemption.”
Shmuel Menachem Mendel Butman was born on Jan. 30, 1943, in the Soviet Union to Rabbi Shneur Zalman Butman and Yehudis Butman, who was a descendant of the third Rebbe of Chabad, a movement that began in Eastern Europe in the 18th century.
In 1947, after World War II, the family escaped to Paris, where they first met a visiting Rabbi Schneerson. They emigrated to the United States in the mid-1950s.
Rabbi Butman was educated at the Lubavitch school in Brunoy, France; at the Lubavitcher yeshiva in Brooklyn; and at the Rabbinical College of Canada, a Chabad institution in Montreal.
His survivors include his wife, Rochel (Geisinsky) Butman; his sons, the Rabbis Velvel and Yossi Butman; his daughters, Yehudis Newman, Chana Korf, Bassie Munitz and Dassie Heber; his sisters, Leah Kahn and Miryam Swerdlov; and more than 50 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He lived in Crown Heights.
The Chabad community website announcement of his death recalled that Rabbi Butman had written “The Rebbe in Paris,” a book about Rabbi Schneerson’s three visits to the French capital; published a weekly pamphlet called L’Chaim; wrote a weekly column for The Jewish Press; and hosted a weekly program for COLlive.com, the Chabad-Lubavitch website.
While the announcement briefly mentioned that he had “established the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach,” it added conspicuously that Rabbi Butman “has since left the organization,” without elaborating on an enduring rift among some Hasidim.
“His legacy is the continuing and uncomfortable problem of Chabad having to contend with this idea of their last leader being a false messiah,” said Samuel Heilman, a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and Jewish studies at Queens College and the City University of New York. It is a belief, he added, that “they are stuck with, and that prevents them from selecting a new leader that will unite a group that is now fractured.”
