Series 1: Oral histories, 1993–1994, inclusive

Rev. Dr. A.R. Bernard was born in Panama City, Panama, in 1953. At the age of four, he and his mother, Adelina Fleming, an Olympic track star, immigrated to the United States. Rev. Bernard grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. He was bused to Ridgewood, Queens, in the 1960s to attend junior high and high school. Impacted by the racism and segregation he experienced, Rev. Dr. Bernard became interested in the Black Panthers and a follower of the Nation of Islam. On January 11, 1975, he became a Christian. At the time of the 1993 interview, he was ministering to 625 families in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. Focused on a conservative, family-centered, practical faith, Rev. Dr. Bernard is, as of 2026, the senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center located at 1400 Linden Boulevard, Brooklyn, New York.

Chaim Burston was born to Jewish-American parents in Pasadena, California. After enrolling at Tel Aviv University, Chaim traveled to Israel. After joining a Lubavitch Hasidic community as a baal teshuvah (a Jew returning to Orthodoxy), Burston returned to the United States to continue his studies in New York. It was in the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he met his wife Chana. The young couple married, purchased a home—and with Chaim becoming an elementary school teacher along the way—had eight children together. A musician, Burston had taken to playing melodies intended to accompany prayers.

Rachel Lea Cattan, a Jewish resident of Crown Heights, was born to Polish parents in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in the former Soviet Union. At the age of eleven, her parents moved the family to Lodz, Poland, and a year later to Braslav. Then, at age thirteen, the family immigrated to the United States, settling in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. Cattan attended New York public schools, including the Music and Art High School (now Fiorella H. LaGuardia High School). She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at the Pratt Institute. At the time of the 1993 interview, she was a public school teacher in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and a divorced mother of four.

Avroham Crawford grew up in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son of Irish-Catholic immigrants from Newfoundland. He was raised in the church, but considered converting to Judaism while studying for his bachelor's degree in philosophy at NYU, where he worked as a librarian at the time of this interview. He moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights in 1970 and, shortly afterward, converted to Orthodox Judaism with assistance from Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson. He chose the Jewish name "Avroham" at this time. In 1975, he married Suri Perlman, and they had three children: Nechama, Yitzhak, and Yisroel. He died in 2011.

Nechama Crawford was raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. She attended a private Lubavitch school, Bais Rivkah, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. At her Bat Mitzvah, she read from the Genesis chapter Chayei Sarah, or "The Life of Sarah." Her younger brother, Yisroel, attended Oholei Torah—a Lubavitch school that focuses on religious education and teaches exclusively in Hebrew and Yiddish—before switching to Lubavitch Yeshiva. Their mother, Suri, grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and had a Modern Orthodox upbringing among her Litvish (Latvian Jewish) family.

Roxanne De Shong was born in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. She immigrated to Brooklyn in the 1970s with her parents and settled on Crown Street in the Crown Heights neighborhood. Her father sold life insurance and her mother worked near the family home at Woolworth's. She went to a public school in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn for one year, then to Holy Spirit Catholic School for grades two to eight. She attended Clara Barton High School and then Hostoff's in The Bronx. De Shong studied to become a Dental Assistant in high school and worked at several offices in New York City. De Shong has children, including one son whose father was shot and killed in a drug-related incident in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, which she mentioned in her interview.

Esther Goldman was born in Poland in 1926. An observant Jew from birth, she came to New York with her mother and siblings in 1934, joining her father, who had arrived two years earlier. After living in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn for several years, Goldman's family moved to Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood in 1941. After marrying and briefly living in Philadelphia, Goldman returned to Crown Heights with her husband, and they had four children together. With Goldman's children grown and out of the house, she began working for a company on Broadway and Spring Street in Manhattan.

Joseph Harold Haynes grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn. He attended Haaren High School for aviation studies and received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri. Haynes was employed as a mechanical engineer for the New York City Transit Authority and as an accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. He was a licensed commercial pilot and flight instructor. A contributor to the now-defunct New Museum Community Museum, Haynes was a founding member of the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville. Haynes was in his 60s at the time of his interview. He died March 2, 1997.

At the time of the 1993 interview, Iyedun Ince, an African-American resident of Crown Heights, was twenty years old. Born in Harlem, New York, he and his brother Ojo Ashegun were raised by a single mother in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. He attended parochial and public schools in the area and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. As of 2016, Iyedun is a djembe musician and teacher in New York City.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson was born in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights in 1956. Observant from birth, he attended Lubavitch Yeshiva and lived on St. Marks Avenue before moving to Sullivan Place. His father was Gershon Jacobson, founder and publisher of the Yiddish-language Hasidic newspaper Der Algemeiner. For several years, Jacobson worked as the editor and translator of speeches by the Lubavitch Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. Later, he became the director of Vaad Hanochos Hatmimim, a foundation that promotes Schneerson's teachings. A noted teacher in the community, he founded a Lubavitch organization for outreach and education called the Meaningful Life Center, based on Eastern Parkway.

Baila Kamman was born in the Bronx, New York, to middle-class, secular Jewish parents. While on a summer vacation during her stint as a New York City public school teacher, she was traveling in Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Kamman explains that the experience left her with a renewed interest in her religion. Opting to relocate to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights with a group of women seeking an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, Kamman and her friends faced a steep learning curve as they tried to navigate the traditions and mores of their new community. She married and completed a law degree while raising five children. After briefly relocating to Rockland County, New York, in the late 1980s, Kamman and her husband were once again residing in Crown Heights in 1993.

Zalman Kleinman was born in 1933 in Leningrad, the former Soviet Union, to a Lubavitch family. After the death of his parents, he and his sister were sent to Siberia, where a rabbi adopted him. For a time he lived amongst the Bukharian Jews in Samarkand. Kleinman immigrated to Paris, where he studied at an underground Lubavitch yeshiva. From Paris, he traveled to Israel, where he began painting. He returned to Paris, where he met and married his wife Rosa. In 1958, they immigrated to New York City and to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. Kleinman was an illustrator and artist known for painting Hasidic life. He died in 1995.

Esther Blau, in her forties with twelve children, was born into a Lubavitch family in the Midwest and moved to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn when she married. She gathered colleagues of the Cookbook Committee to discuss many aspects of life in Crown Heights.

Carlos Lezama was born in 1923 in Coro, Venezuela. He grew up in Trinidad but later returned to Venezuela, where he was an auto worker for General Motors and Chrysler, as well as a mechanic in Caracas specializing in dental machinery. After that, he departed for a job as a merchant mariner. It was during his travels as a seaman that he first visited the United States and eventually resolved to move to New York City, which he did, alone, in 1954. He had lived in Manhattan for about two years when he moved to Crown Heights after noticing the greater movement of Caribbean people into the neighborhood. Soon after his move, his wife and children joined him. They were all congregants at Saint Gregory Catholic Church. He continued to work as a mechanic, taking vocational courses to supplement his training, and bought a home on St. Johns Place. During this time, he became a prominent figure in the cultural life of the West Indian residents of Crown Heights.

Along with Rufus (Lionel) Gorin, he was a key organizer of the first Carnival parade on Eastern Parkway, now commonly known as the West Indian American Day Parade, in 1969. When Gorin died, Lezama was elected the first president of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA), a position he held until his retirement in 2002. He died in 2007.

Bracha Meshchaninov was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. At fourteen, she began seeking a deeper connection to her Jewish faith and, at eighteen, traveled to Jerusalem to attend Neve Yerushalayim, an all-girls religious school. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with degrees in English, guidance counseling, and education, she returned to Israel. At twenty-two, Bracha traveled to the United States, where she studied with Lubavitch Hasidim. She soon dedicated herself to Yiddishkeit (a Yiddish word meaning "Jewishness") and married her husband Ilya. At the time of the 1993 interview, she was in her thirties and a photographer living in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. She now lives in Rockland County, New York, where she is an educator and Yoga teacher.

Moshe Meshchaninov was born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union in 1954. As a young engineer, Moshe was influenced by his younger brother and began exploring religious Judaism. This led to the family immigrating to the United States in the early 1980s, where he discovered the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights and the Lubavitch community. He met and married his wife, Yuhudis Chana, also a baal teshuvah (a Jew who has returned to Orthodoxy). In 2015, Meshchaninov was a resident of the Lubavitch community of Monsey, New York, and the principal of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning corporation.

Fritznel Milfort was born and raised in Haiti. In 1972, he immigrated to the United States, where he was reunited with his mother and sister. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, New York. Milfort completed an undergraduate degree in accounting and a master's degree at Long Island University. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant who has worked for the Internal Revenue Service, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, Mitchell/Titus and Oppenheimer, and Appel and Dixon. At the time of the interview in 1993, Milfort ran several businesses in the Church Avenue area of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush. For most of his time in the United States, he has lived in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. As of 2026, he operates his own accounting firm in Crown Heights.

Evelyn Morris, a Black resident of Crown Heights, was born in Blackville, South Carolina, in 1935. At the age of eleven, she moved to New York City with her sister to reunite with her mother. She spent the remainder of her childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1972, she moved with her six children to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. At the time of the 1993 interview, Morris was working in a school cafeteria and still living in the same apartment. A number of her children and grandchildren live nearby. She was also employed as a food supervisor for the New York City Board of Education.

Born in Mandeville, Jamaica, in 1959, Rev. Dr. Clive E. Neil came to the United States on a soccer scholarship. He was an honors student at Eastern University and a fellow at Princeton University. He has a master's degree in Divinity and a doctorate in Counseling from Drew University. He was ordained and served as minister at Tremont Presbyterian Church in the Bronx from 1985 to 1988. His pastorship at Bedford-Central Presbyterian Church began in 1988. He has written three books, taught and lectured at area colleges, and enrolled as a Ministry Leadership Network scholar. Rev. Dr. Neil has two children. As of 2026, Rev. Dr. Neil is the Senior Pastor at the Bedford Central Presbyterian Church.

At the time of the interview in 1993, Basha Oka was a forty-one-year-old Lubavitch baal teshuvah (a Jew returned to Orthodoxy) living in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and working in public relations. Originally from Miami Beach, Florida, Oka was raised in a Conservative Jewish home. Her father was mayor of Miami Beach. She attended Northwestern University and transferred to Barnard, from which she graduated. She attended Yale for a master's degree in theater.

Sharon Pikus was born in 1945 and raised in apartments on Rockaway Parkway and St. Marks Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. She attended two elementary public schools and Wingate High School, graduating in 1962. After two years at the University of Buffalo, she transferred to Syracuse University, where she completed her bachelor's degree. She obtained a master's degree from the Teachers' College at Columbia University. Both degrees were in Special Education for the Visually Impaired. She worked part-time as a teacher for over fifteen years before joining the four-generation family real estate business. Working with her husband, Rubin Pikus, she serves as Chief Operating Officer and Secretary of Milbrook Properties, Ltd. She's a mother of two daughters, a grandmother, and has co-chaired the Commission for Women's Equality of the American Jewish Congress.

Louvenia Pointer, a Black woman born in 1916 as Louvenia White, was raised in Holly Hill, South Carolina, until 1926. She then lived in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City while working as a professional pianist, organist, and soprano. She studied Music Education at New York University and was cast in many Broadway productions, working with artists and thespians including Noel Coward and Ossie Davis. Pointer directed the National Youth Administration Radio Workshop chorus in 1943. She married William Davis Pointer, Sr. in 1947. Moving to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights in 1954, they raised three children. Retired from the theater, Pointer worked as a music teacher in several Brooklyn schools as well as privately. She was active in civic affairs and participated in her block association and the Brooklyn Women's Coalition. She founded the Great Day Chorale, a touring a cappella group, in 1987. She died in 2009.

Reverend William D. Pointer, Jr. was born to William and Louvenia Pointer in New York City in 1952. He was raised on Carroll St. in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, along with a brother and sister. Pointer graduated from George W. Wingate High School in 1970. He is married to Elder Lillie Pointer, who serves with him at the Christian Cultural Center (CCC). Since 1992, Rev. Pointer has served at CCC as Associate Pastor and Senior Elder, as well as the Director of the Performing Arts Ministry. He and his wife have traveled and ministered across the globe. In 2009, his book "Moving from Pain to Power" was published. As of 2026, Rev. Dr. Pointer is an Associate Pastor and Senior Elder at the CCC.

A Jamaican American, Carl E. Roberts has lived in Brooklyn for all his adult life. He emigrated in 1954 while still in his teens, when his family moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. He worked full-time at a Macy's department store while attending Brooklyn College part-time. His family moved to the Crown Heights neighborhood in 1958. After serving in the Army for over two years, he took a job as a bank teller. Roberts, an Investment Banking major, completed his education at New York University. He went to work for New York Life Insurance and also started a tax consulting business at home with help from his wife. For much of the 1980s, Roberts was a local politician and community activist, serving on Community Board Nine and related committees. He ran three unsuccessful campaigns for a seat in the New York State Assembly.

Bella (Biela) Rubovzkin was born in 1933 in Krolevets, Ukraine. Observant from birth, she fled her home village as World War II intensified in 1941. She and her family migrated east to Saratov, Russia, and then further east until the war's end. She met her future husband, Gabriel Rubaszkin, a Russian Jew, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Religious persecution forced their move to the United States after passing through several countries. During their five-year stay in France, Bella and Gabriel were married. They arrived in New York in 1954. By 1958, they had settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights and began raising a family. By 1993, they were grandparents. They sold their Carroll Street home in 2005 and have since resided in White Lake, New York, and Miami Beach, Florida.

Aviva Segall grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, in a Conservative Jewish family. Aviva first became acquainted with Hasidism at a Lubavitch-sponsored youth event in her hometown at the age of fourteen. Four years later, Aviva met a Hasidic woman at a women's conference in Minnesota who invited Segall to attend her wedding in Crown Heights. She traveled to Brooklyn and formed her first impressions of the neighborhood. She eventually joined other formerly secular women as baal teshuvah (Jews who returned to Orthodoxy) and immersed herself in the Hasidic lifestyle of Crown Heights. Some years later, Segall got married and began a family with her husband. At the time of the 1993 interview, she was a research assistant on the Crown Heights History Project and a twenty-year resident of Crown Heights.

Devora Leah Shaffer-Slutzkin (Devori) grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, with her parents and nine siblings. She graduated from Beth Rivkah High School and, at eighteen, attended Beth Rivkah's teacher training seminary and Touro College. She visited international Lubavitch camps and served as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She married Reb Doron Slutzkin and resides in Zurich, Switzerland.

Martha Sacolick was born in 1931 on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to Polish Jews who had immigrated to the United States after World War II. In her childhood, the family resided on Herzl Street in Brooklyn and then Stanton Street in Manhattan. She attended P.S. 65, graduated from Seward Park High School, and then took accounting courses. As an adult, she lived in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park. She met her husband, Shimshon Stock, while working at a belt manufacturer in the early 1950s, and they married in Borough Park. Stock was born into an Orthodox family in New York City in 1929. In his childhood, the family resided in the Rockaway Beach and Brownsville neighborhoods. He and Martha first shared a home in East New York, and in 1964, they settled in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Stock was a community leader, working closely with the Lubavitch Rebbe on several occasions. The couple had a son and two daughters, and over a dozen grandchildren. Martha and Shimshon Stock died in 2007.

Dellon Wilson was born in Saint Anne, Jamaica, and raised in Kingston. In her pre-teens, Wilson moved to Westchester County, New York. After graduating from White Plains High School, she enlisted in the United States Army. After serving, she attended New York University and Hunter College, where she completed an undergraduate degree in Theatre and Film Production and a master's degree in Biology. In 1980, Wilson moved in to an apartment on Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. She worked as forensic medicine microbiologist in a Medical Examiner's office for eight years. After taking leave from full-time employment due to a job-related illness, Wilson volunteered her time to women's rights and AIDS-related causes. She died in September, 1995.