NEW YORK - Max Rosenbaum, the father of a visiting scholar who was killed in an assault that sparked race riots in Brooklyn in 1991, died in Australia yesterday after a major heart attack. He was 85.
Mr. Rosenbaum carried no bitterness against New Yorkers, said Isaac Abraham, a community activist in the Hasidic community who got to know the family.
"He loved New York, he loved the people," Abraham said yesterday. "They just felt the city at that time failed them."
Yankel Rosenbaum, a Hasidic scholar and doctoral student from Australia, was attacked by a mob after a Hasidic driver accidentally hit and killed a 7-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato, in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section.
Angry blacks formed a mob that descended on Rosenbaum on Aug. 19 yelling, "Get the Jew!" Rosenbaum, who was stabbed four times, died a day later. He was 29.
The violence continued for more than two days as black youths swept through the neighborhood, burning police cars, looting stores, and throwing bottles.
The riot helped shape the course of New York City politics, contributing to then-Mayor David Dinkins' loss to Rudy Giuliani in 1993. Jewish groups and a state investigation faulted Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, for not taking more decisive steps to stop the Crown Heights violence.
Max Rosenbaum, his wife, Fay, and their son Norman made regular appearances at court hearings in the cases against Yankel Rosenbaum's alleged assailants.
Lemrick Nelson, who was 16 at the time of the attack, was acquitted of state murder charges but convicted of federal civil rights charges in the 1990s. An appeals court later overturned the federal conviction, saying the judge had tampered with the racial makeup of the jury. In 2003, a new jury found Nelson guilty of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights.
Charles Price, a codefendant accused of instigating blacks to assault Jews after the 7-year-old's death, pleaded guilty in 2002 to violating Rosenbaum's civil rights.
Norman Rosenbaum remembered his father as a tireless crusader for civil rights, who was determined "that no other person would ever be subjected to the same type of violence" because of their race or ethnicity.