For the Likes of Ehud Halevi

By COLlive reporter

Members and friends of the Aliya Institute in Crown Heights gathered Wednesday night at the center’s small building on E New York Avenue to give thanks.

With Ehud Halevi back in their midst, regulars who frequent the center for at-risk teens were thrilled that the saga that put them in the limelight would soon come to a good end.

Not long earlier, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office had notified that the charges against Halevi of assault and trespassing were being dropped and that the investigation of the officers that beat him in Aliya would continue.

“We have to realize the power of helping someone else and doing a Mitzvah,” said the center’s director Rabbi Moshe Feiglin.

He said when someone suggested he opens a petition online for Halevi, he was lost at first. “I don’t know much about petitions,” he said. But once it was created, they got close to 140,000 signatures from around the world.

“These people didn’t know Ehud,” he said. “It was a tremendous outpour of chessed, kindness and Mitzvos. People just wanted to do good.”

BEDROOMS FOR ALL

“Now we’ll have some bedrooms instead of couches,” Feiglin said about the area where the 21-year-old who was seen on a security camera being woken up and beaten by two cops on the holiday of Shmini Atzeres.

He announced that a capital building campaign will soon be started to expand the center and create a full-time dormitory for young adults in the community.

Halevi’s attorney Norman Siegel promised that he and his partner Herbert Teitelbaum “will become advocates for this program,” saying that he too was a rebel in his youth in Boro Park.

A civil rights advocate, Teitelbaum said Halevi’s case reminded him of the time he was stopped on Coney Island Avenue and was booked for assaulting a police officer – which he did not do.

“Every time I read the newspaper about an African American kid, a Hispanic kid or in this instance, a Jewish kid, where the intent is to grind that person up in the justice system, I say to myself, I walked in those shoes,” he said.

“Don’t jump to a conclusion that the person is guilty, because now you know that a terrible injustice can be made,” Teitelbaum concluded.

DOUBTS AT RIKER’S

As it appears, Halevi himself at first was worried about whether he had unknowingly struck one of the cops who arrested him.

“I was surprised there were so many charges,” he said in an interview with The Jewish Week on Wednesday. “[The public defender] said I could get up to seven years.”

After contemplating the incident while sitting in a cell on Riker’s Island, he told the lawyer “It’s not true, it’s a lie,” and asked that Rabbi Feiglin be contacted.

Halevy said he is not angry about the incident, according to the New York-based weekly.

“I have no anger in my consciousness; maybe in my sub-consciousness,” said the soft-spoken ex-yeshiva boy, who left his Israeli immigrant parents’ Flatbush home recently because of religious differences.

He ended up at the center because he was familiar with it from his time at a yeshiva high school in Crown Heights, Adam Dickter reported in the Jewish Week.

Halevy said he now spends his time working on a software program that would translate many languages into a universal code based on symbols.

As the celebration came to an end on Wednesday night, Rabbi Feiglin, his colleague Rabbi Noteh Shemtov, the attorneys and Aliya members joined in a joyous chassidic dance, singing “Didan natzach!”

VIDEO: