Crown Hts. pals divided

Festival unease for riot-slay kin

For 25 years, they’ve been friends, the father of 7-year-old Gavin Cato and the brother of Yankel Rosenbaum — two men from different communities whose loved ones’ deaths were at the heart of the 1991 Crown Heights riots.

But the two men, though bound by tragedy, are now divided by something new: the controversy over the neighborhood’s planned festival this weekend commemorating the riots’ 25th anniversary.

“I will not be attending. I don’t think it would be appropriate,” Norman Rosenbaum, a professor from Australia and Yankel’s brother, said over lunch at a Coney Island deli on Wednesday.

When a reporter asked Gavin’s father if he would go, Carmel Cato, who the previous day said he supported the festival, looked uncomfortable.

“As far as participation, unless they will stop me, I don’t think either one will participate,” answered ultra-Orthodox community leader Isaac Abraham, who sat with Rosenbaum and Cato at the luncheon, along with other Jewish and black leaders.

Pressed again on whether he’d go, Cato gently brushed a reporter aside, saying, “Not now.”

The festival is being organized for Sunday by both the black and Jewish communities.

Planners say they want to mark the reconciliation of the two groups and the strides made in the last quarter-century.

But the plans have been strongly opposed by Abraham and other ultra-Orthodox leaders, along with Rosenbaum, who lives and teaches in Australia but returns for anniversaries of his brother’s murder and has maintained correspondence with Cato.

Richard Green, a festival organizer, said he hoped both Rosenbaum and Cato would attend at least the beginning of the day’s events, when black and Jewish leaders will gather for somber speeches at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights.

Whatever the outcome Sunday, the two men will remain close, they predicted.

“I wanted the world, seeing that I was African-American and he was Jewish, I wanted the world to see that we could get along,” said Cato, who initiated the friendship 25 years ago.

Rosenbaum agreed, “We wanted to be sure that people saw us, not just side by side, but arm in arm around one another.”

TRAGIC BOND: Carmel Cato (above left) and Norman Rosenbaum, at lunch Wednesday, have formedmed a bond since the deaths of Cato’s son, Gavin, and Rosenbaum’s brother, Yankel, in the 1991 riots..