Recently hitched Heeb magazine founder Brooklynite Jen Bleyer reports in yesterday’s times about “the scene” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Props to our buddies over at BangItOut.com for their getting featured. Oh and in case you’ve been living under a rock and you haven’t heard, or you’ll be chillin at the ‘Tute with a bunch of us Jewschoolers, be sure to rock out at their Tu B’av gathering this Thursday.
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Haaretz and the NYT report on a local controversy regarding resistance to Westhampton beach Orthodox Jews wanting to put up an eruv.
You would think that wanting to tie some string to a few telephone poles would pretty much be ignored by the rest of the world, but it turns out that putting up an eruv has become a rather problematic venture over the past few years. A number of towns have begun to organize resistance to putting up an eruv.
The strangest part is that the resistance comes from both non-Jews living in the area… and non-Orthodox Jews, including, sometimes, Conservative Jews. It’s not as simple as anti-semiitism. Partly this stems from regions in New York where a few towns have gone from having few to having many Orthodox Jews, and in the process of becoming popular, sometimes the Orthodox community has made itself unpleasant by forcing some non-Jewish businesses out of business. Some of it is ignorance of what an eruv is by the non-Jews. But… you can’t say none of it is anti-semitism. For every five towns area where the Orthodox community has come in and refused to patronize non-shomer Shabbat businesses, are plenty of perfectly nice, normal Orthodox people who are just going about their business.
Ultimately the issue has become that people are protesting having a substantial Orthodox community in their area. The weirdest part for me is having liberal Jews mixed up in this. Okay, I can understand Reform Jews protesting eruvs in their neighborhood: some Reform Jews will stand on principal against any halacha if they are touched by it. (I’ve certainly had to occasionally work in situations where a Reform and Conservative shul will put on a joint program which, for logistical reasons, has to be in a Reform shul. And they will, as a matter of principal, refuse to provide kosher food. (BTW claiming that this is the majority of Reform shuls is as silly as claiming that all Orthodox communities are going to go around closing businesses that aren’t Orthodox owned) It isn’t the usual thing, but at least it isn’t peculiar.) In the case of any Conservative Jews involved in this, it’s downright peculiar, since Conservative Jews need eruvs as much as the Orthodox do: the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat has not been lifted, my Conservative chevre.
But the real story here is that the Orthodox are not always crazy when they start yelling about being picked on. In this case, it’s perfectly true, and in fact, the refusal of townships to put up eruvs because they don’t want the Orthodox to move in is not simple anti-semitism, but is also a form of internalized anti-semitism (I generally detest the use of that term, but it is, very occasionally, warranted). Friends, we need to start getting along better within the Jewish community. Granted, this is not all on one side. The Orthodox need to start working harder to not antagonize liberal Jews over their practices… and ought to be speaking up about Israeli refusal to separate synagogue and state. They could also work to make themselves better neighbors in a more public way. But in most places Orthodox Jews make fine neighbors, and finding ways to keep them out is just wrong, and bad for Am Yisrael, even if the Orthodox can’t meet the non-Orthodox halfway.
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Week Three, Day three:
Tiferet of Tiferet
I originally was going to blog this as a “wow, some good news for a change” post, but as I realized exactly where this all was taking place, that pretty quickly slid away. Ynet reports about a new green(er) energy production site for Jerusalem. Using methane produced by a local garbage dump, electricity will be produced for Jerusalem municipality. And this is good news, of course; it’s a far greener process than coal produced electricity.
But I can’t help but sigh over the whole thing anyway. The Abu Dis dump is actually one of the first places where i was involved with Israeli activism because of the Jahalin Bedouin living there.
Why, you may ask are the Jahalin living in a garbage dump?
As one can read at the Bustan website, “The Jahalin were settled by the Israeli government on lands of Abu Dis, after their dispossession from the Negev in the 1950s. This land was later declared ‘state land,’ and in 1975, the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the West Bank was founded on the expropriated Palestinian lands of Abu Dis, Azzariya, Issawiya, A-tur and Anata.”
Although it was due to government forcible relocation that the Bedouin were living in Abu Dis to begin with, it took many years of a court case to get the government to even being to live up to its responsibilities. Well, all right, at least to recognize them, even if not to follow through. YOu know, little things, like providing water and electricity.
In the meantime, Maale Adumim continues to expand so that the Bedouin can see just over the hill beautiful houses with great city services, clean streets, and the other accoutrements of Jewish life in Israel.
I can’t begin to say how sad it was for me to see people living in shipping containers and struggling to maintain their way of life and their dignity under some very trying circumstances.
Due to the encroachment of Ma’ale Adumim, the Jahalin were forcefully evicted from their homes a second time. In addition to losing their homes, they lost their land, their animals, and their ability to farm or graze the lands. Subsequently the Jahalin were uprooted from their traditional sustenance and forced to find work without benefits as day laborers in low-income fields, often in one of the neighboring Jewish settlements. They are living in corrugated tin shacks without basic amenities, without health care, without electricity.
Ma’ale Adumim begins on the neighboring hill, replete with beautiful villas to house 35,000 settlers that receive tax breaks and other government subsidies to live there. There are new educational and cultural institutions; widely paved, fine-landscaped roads and traffic lights in and around the settlement; public gardens; swimming pools, restaurants; shops; and even a Meretz chapter. Juxtaposed with this suburban expanse, the Jahalin have been transplanted into a cramped corner of Azzariya, sandwiched between settlements and living next to Jerusalem’s municipal waste dump.
Well, I’m just so glad the residents of Jerusalem can be greener in their use of electricity. Maybe they can share some of it with the Bedouin now.
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On April 6, the OU is putting on an event at the Grand Hyatt in New York - the Emerging Jewish Communities Showcase.
Your next community is coming to visit you!
Pursue your dream of a professionally enriching, religiously and personally rewarding life in a community with affordable homes in a friendly, supportive neighborhood, where you can be a key person, helping to bolster the Torah environment.
The cities involved are Indianapolis, New Orleans, Edmonton, Charleston, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Memphis, Oakland, San Francisco, Omaha, San Diego, Seattle, and Vancouver. This looks like a fascinating study in what it takes to build community - for any little population - as well as how small communities market themselves. I know that our local OU rabbi is busting his butt trying to revive his old shul and this sort of event is a great chance for him to make his case to young couples who are tired of paying New York rents. (Not that they’ll do much better in San Francisco…)
Of course price-fueled moves don’t just happen on the big, inter-city level. It happens all the time on the intracity level when communities send off little offshoots of folks who can’t or won’t choose to afford overpriced homes in traditional neighborhoods. I have watched in the last five years as a new observant community has sprung up on the edges of the Mission in San Francisco - previously it was the western neighborhoods or bust.
What other cities that you live in have witnessed offshoots recently? How long does it take for one community to splinter into two, into four? And if you’re trying to attract new young families to your smaller city, what kind of lures do you need for them?
The Forward: High Cost of Living Leads Orthodox To Look Beyond Borders of New York
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