SYDNEY, Australia — Even though it was where his son lost his life, Max Rosenbaum never hated New York.

Rosenbaum, who died in Australia on Sunday at 85 after a major heart attack, was the father of Yankel Rosenbaum, who was killed in an assault that fueled violent race riots in the city in 1991. Rosenbaum visited the city, making regular appearances at court sessions for those accused of killing his son. But he carried no bitterness against New Yorkers, a community activist in the chasidic community who got to know the family, Isaac Abraham, said. “He loved New York, he loved the people,” Mr. Abraham said yesterday. “They just felt the city at that time failed them.”

Yankel Rosenbaum, a chasidic scholar and doctoral student from Australia, was attacked by a mob after a chasidic driver accidentally hit and killed a 7-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato, in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section in August 1991.

Irate blacks formed a mob that descended on Rosenbaum on August 19 yelling, “Get the Jew!” Rosenbaum, 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 Mayor Dinkins’s loss to Rudy Giuliani in 1993. Jewish groups and a state investigation faulted Mr. 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. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but released within a year because of time he had already served.

Co-defendant Charles Price, accused of instigating blacks to assault Jews after the 7-year-old’s death, ultimately pleaded guilty in 2002 to violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. Price was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in prison, more than half of which he had already served.

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.

As soon as the father learned the circumstances of his son Yankel’s killing, “he made a commitment not for revenge, but to obtain justice for my brother,” he told the Associated Press.