Events took place Sunday in Brooklyn to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the Crown Heights Riots.
Community members honored the memories of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum at a memorial service at the Jewish Children's Museum.
Cato was seven years old when he was hit by a station wagon that veered onto the sidewalk that he and his cousin were playing on with their bicycles. Cato was killed.
Riots broke out in the neighborhood after rumors spread that a volunteer Jewish ambulance attended only to the car's driver and ignored the children.
Rosenbaum, a Hasidic scholar from Australia, was stabbed to death during the riots.
"From those two dear lives, we're going to be able now to save millions and millions of people because we'll be able to find ways to communicate, find ways to cooperate, find ways to grow together," said Richard Green of the Crown Heights Youth Initiative.
A march was held Sunday through the neighborhood, along with a festival in Brower Park, to promote diversity and unity.
Organizers say progress made in mending fences between the two communities should be celebrated.
"25 years later we're still growing, we're still making progress, we're still looking to each other for answers, and we're still able to show the rest of the world that two people very diverse in terms of our practices can actually still find ways to relate to each other," Green said.
"I think our coalition, which Richard has been a greater leader in, has held things together and really brought the community together," said Eli Cohen of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council.
While Cato's dad, Carmel, did not speak Sunday at a public commemoration of the riots, he did greet the small crowd from the stage.
But Rosenbaum's relatives stayed away, instead holding a small memorial service Friday.
"It has struck a chord that not everyone is happy," said Cohen. "But we do what we do because we feel that we can bring people together."
"There are many people who have been working very hard to create great alliances between our communities here in Crown Heights, and I think it's great that there's a commemoration in which the communities are coming together," one woman said.
But many acknowledged it has not been an easy path in a community traditionally split along racial and religious lines, and which is now increasingly dealing with gentrification.
"We have come now to write a new chapter," said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, who is the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.
"Years ago, we spoke of Crown Hate," Potasnik continued. "The new chapter speaks of Crown Harmony."
Even during the at-times awkward commemoration of a dark moment in the city's history, speakers said the words "Crown Heights" have new meaning a quarter century later.
"The world we want for our young people is not the world of that day," said Rudy Crew, the president of CUNY Medgar Evers College. "The attitudes that we want in our young people are not the attitudes that begot that day."