Last month, the period of penitential prayers and soul searching in the Jewish calendar, was dominated in Williamsburg’s Hasidic community by shouting matches, fist-fights and quarrels. This time around the tiff involves the eruv—an area in which observant Jews are allowed to carry possessions during the Sabbath, when no work is allowed.
The argument about this Jewish law deteriorated in September to violence, arrests and headlines in local dailies. An observant woman carrying a baby-stroller was attacked and stripped in public by young Hasidics, in an incident that shocked the community. And the Sabbath wars may go on.
The battle is a metaphor of the state of the Hasidic communities in New York City on this year’s High Holidays. The Hasids are characterized by divisions, inner struggles and political contests. In the Satmar community, which features the lead characters in the eruv saga, a succession battle between the brothers Zalman Leib and Aharon Teitelbaum has already reached the courts. The Chabad community, meanwhile, is divided between the messianists, who believe in the resurrection of Rebbe Schneerson from Lubavitch as the Messiah, and the anti-messianists, who hold that the rabbi’s death almost a decade ago negate the option of his return. The other, smaller communities lack a unifying rabbi.
“It doesn’t matter what they’re fighting about,” says Samuel Heilman, a professor who has written on ultra-orthodox communities, “as long as they are fighting.”
The eruv, which literally means a wire hanging from poles, signifies the boundary within which anything from keys to carriages is allowed to be carried during the Sabbath. It has been the focus of many local intrigues over the years. Its antagonists are often gentiles, who base their opposition on aesthetics and constitutional arguments. Such a municipal dispute recently took place in Tenafly, N.J., reaching the Supreme Court this summer (which refused to hear the case). Otherwise, the aversion comes from within the Hasidic community, based on the Halacha (Jewish Law), politics or mere pettiness.
Eruv is a problem in New York City with its dense population. The Halacha forbids any eruv in a public place where over 600,000 people pass by over the course of a day. Times Square is undisputedly not kosher. The question gets complicated when people in vehicles are counted (or not). There were attempts in the past to institutionalize eruv at different neighborhoods around the city, with varying degrees of success, until three years ago it was established in the Hasidic stronghold of Borough Park.
“Slowly but surely all the eruvim were confirmed, due to pressure from women,” said Heilman. “The women suffer the most in the absence of an eruv. They’re stuck all day at home with the kids during the Sabbath.” The last anti-eruv bastion was Williamsburg, a neighborhood where half of its 25,000 Hasidic residents belong to Satmar, an established, anti-Zionist and highly religious sect. “There are eruvim in other communities, but the Satmars want to emphasize that they’re more orthodox than the others,” said Heilman.
Last Passover, around May, the effort to establish an eruv in Williamsburg gathered steam, and was led by a number of small sects (Papa, Baalez, Winitch). The Satmars declared their staunch opposition in rallies, during sermons and by cutting down the wires. To avoid dismantling of the physical boundary, an eruv map was secretly distributed—a trapeze-shaped area south of Broadway, starting just east of the Williamsburg Bridge, covering about 15 square blocks. While proponents handed out bottled water for the crowd to carry, opponents responded by violent skirmishes and threats. Many police officers were sent to the neighborhood every Saturday to keep the peace.
When the ultra-orthodox population returned from its summer vacation in the Catskills (the Hasidic version of the Hamptons) things heated up again. One episode last month received the following description in New Faces, the local weekly: “Whoever witnessed how they behaved in Williamsburg this Sabbath could believe that human beings are worse than preying animals. They stood near a hall, just like drug addicts, waiting for an easy prey, women and small children, to beat up brutally for the crime of carrying something during the Sabbath in accordance with their rabbis’ edicts proclaiming the Williamsburg eruv kosher.”
On Rosh Hashanah, the neighborhood was quiet. The streets were nearly empty from cars and the sidewalks were full with yeshiva students, women and kids. A woman pushing a baby stroller and an old man with a plastic bag could be seen walking safely. The only evidences of the dispute were wall posters against the eruv and a pair of bored cops patrolling the streets next to buildings with paint peeling off the walls. Most of the locals speak Yiddish and were not enthusiastic about being interviewed. The common response on the issue was, “That’s what our rabbi said.”
“What you’ve got here is an inner conflict within the Satmar community,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant with many years of experience working with Jewish communities. “And it’s consistent with a recent trend in that community.” The virulence between the two sons of Moses Teitelbaum, the community’s former grand rebbe, who have been very ill in recent years, already resulted in riots, arsons and court appearances. Supporters of Aharon Teitelbaum, who officially objects to the eruv, took the dispute as an opportunity to attack followers of his brother and nemesis, Zalman Leib, who wields control over most of the neighborhood’s Satmars. Politically, the struggle, “weakens the power of the community, which cannot deliver a united vote,” Sheinkopf says. “The best solution to the problem is that they have one rabbi.”
The lack of a widely accepted rabbi is becoming a momentous difficulty for ultra-orthodox sects. In Crown Heights a theological argument about whether the Lubavitcher Schneerson is the Messiah (as was promised before he died), is tearing the community apart. “They lost rabbis because of death,” Sheinkopf said, “and they can’t replace them. This is the problem.”
“This is why we’re having so many problems, because we’re fighting among ourselves,” says Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), an orthodox Jew who represents several Jewish neighborhoods. “Instead of being united, we fight, and often it’s about nonsense.”
In Williamsburg, the arguments revolved around chastity and the sanctity of the Sabbath. “People make all kind of excuses,” Hikind says. “Some really believe it’s forbidden, but you also get those who like the excitement of conflict.” He disapproves of the violence and the attempt to force one’s opinion on the entire population. “It doesn’t only lead to division, it leads to animosity,” he says. “If somebody wants to hate someone, I can give him a lot of people he can hate. But this is crazy, this is nuts. What are we doing?”
Professor Heilman describes these quarrels as an integral part of the closed, isolated ultra-orthodox societies. Most activities in the community involve fundraising (the unemployed but fertile masses are very poor), efforts to ban the outer world from infiltrating and political wrangling. “They don’t have anything else to do,” he says. “There is no entertainment, so you can say that a large part of their world is this struggle.”
Sheinkopf says that the Williamsburg fights have no affect whatsoever on other Jews, to whom the neighborhood “is another planet in another galaxy. Jews from Park Avenue simply don’t care.” But some are dismayed by the never-ending wars or by the fact that almost any mention of Hasidics in The Post is about arrests. As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, approaches, Hikind points out, Jews will be evaluated on following the commandments between man and God as well as those between man and his fellow man. “He who emphasizes only the relationship between man and God,” he says, “is not a complete Jew.”
