LAKEWOOD, N.J., Oct. 10 — The severe beating of a Hebrew studies teacher as he walked to synagogue Tuesday evening on a quiet residential street here has shaken this shore town, which in recent years has seen rapid population changes, including a surging Orthodox Jewish community.

No one had been arrested in the beating, and the police said they did not know the motive for the attack. But the fact that the teacher was not robbed and that the assailant was identified as a black man wielding an aluminum baseball bat has raised fears of a bias crime.

Community leaders — including the mayor, the police chief and representatives of the Orthodox Jewish, black and Hispanic communities — gathered Wednesday afternoon in a closed-door meeting to discuss how to head off any possible repercussions from the attack.

The teacher, Rabbi Mordechai Moskowitz, suffered severe head injuries and remained hospitalized in intensive care, but he was expected to recover, his family and the police said.

Alan Weisberger, his brother-in-law, said that Mr. Moskowitz, 53, was so badly beaten that relatives did not recognize him when they got to the hospital. He said of the attacker, “He left him for dead.”

Lakewood, a town of 74,000 people, has grown rapidly over the last 15 years, with thousands of new residents moving in, most of them Orthodox Jews or Hispanics. The town’s black population has started to shrink, part of what the mayor, Ray Coles, called the “dwindling non-Orthodox middle class.” Relations among the ethnic groups have been positive, he said, with some notable exceptions. Tensions were high this summer at the trial of an Orthodox Jewish middle school teacher accused of assaulting a black teenager, especially amid allegations that other Orthodox Jews had shouted racial epithets at the teenager, Jamarr Dickerson. The teacher, Elchonon Zimmerman, was found not guilty of assault, even though the judge accused him of racism.

Last year, a state inquiry heightened local divisions when it found wide disparities in the quality of special education programs for white, black and Hispanic preschoolers. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Coles said, teenagers from another town threw eggs at a group of Orthodox Jews.

But the mayor and several Orthodox leaders praised the local Police Department’s record of pursuing bias crimes, and investigators said that at this point they had no reason to believe racism played a role in the attack on Mr. Moskowitz.

Mr. Moskowitz has said that before he was struck on the head, he and his attacker walked by each other without speaking, according to Detective Lt. Joseph Isnardi, the commander of the Lakewood detective bureau. A bloody aluminum bat was found at the scene, and the police said the attacker was described as a black man in his 30s or 40s wearing a dark plaid shirt.

Mr. Weisberger said that Mr. Moskowitz, who has taught third graders for decades at the Lakewood Cheder School for boys, was on his way to synagogue at the time of the attack.

Outside the Lakewood municipal building Wednesday, where the community leaders met, young men wearing skullcaps stood around, one of them passing out fliers that asked, “Could it be that the local authorities have not been vigilant enough in maintaining the safety of the town’s inhabitants?”

But Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, who heads the Lakewood Community Services Corporation and who attended the meeting of community leaders, said that the fliers were the work of provocateurs trying to inflame tensions.

The leadership group, created at the suggestion of the federal Department of Justice, did exactly what was needed, Rabbi Weisberg and others said: The leaders talked openly, in case the events around them threatened to stop any talking.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company