The following is an unedited national story on the AP wire:
Amid a new surge of COVID-19 in New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities, many members are reviving health measures that some had abandoned over the summer — social distancing, wearing masks. For many, there’s also a return of anger: They feel the city is singling them out for criticism.
The latest blow: an order Monday from Gov. Andrew Cuomo temporarily closing public and private schools in several areas with large Orthodox populations. It will take effect Tuesday.
“People are very turned off and very burned out,” said Yosef Hershkop, a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who works for a chain of urgent-care centers. “It’s not like we’re the only people in New York getting COVID.”
Over the past few weeks, top government officials, including Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, have sounded the alarm about localized upticks in COVID-19 after several months in which the state had one of the nation’s lowest infection rates. Officials say the worst-hit ZIP codes overlap with large Orthodox Jewish communities in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens and in a couple of nearby counties.
The goal is to head off a feared second wave of infections months after the city beat back an outbreak that killed more than 24,000 New Yorkers.
Under the shutdown plan submitted to Cuomo by the mayor, 100 public schools and 200 private ones would be closed in nine areas that are home to close to 500,000 people. Those areas represent 7% of the city’s population but have been responsible for about 1,850 new cases in the past four weeks — more than 20% of all new infections in the city during that span.
De Blasio had proposed the shutdown on Sunday, the second day of the Jewish holiday Sukkot, when Orthodox Jews would not be using telephones or computers and thus wouldn’t have heard the news until sundown.
“Announcing this in the middle of a Jewish holiday shows City Hall’s incompetence and lack of sensitivity towards the Jewish Community,” tweeted Daniel Rosenthal, a state Assembly member from Queens.
De Blasio said he was aware of the holiday but felt obligated to announce the plan as soon as it was developed.
The emphasis on the Orthodox communities rankled many of their members, even as civic and religious leaders acknowledged the dangers posed by the new outbreak and urged compliance with guidelines. Many say they are already straining to balance rituals and traditions centered on communal gatherings with health rules.
Last week, Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization, worked with the Boro Park Jewish Community Council to distribute 400,000 masks. Fern Sidman, a journalist with the newspaper The Jewish Voice, said many families are canceling bar mitzvahs or planning to sharply reduce attendance.
The Jewish Voice is urging compliance with health guidelines such as mask wearing and social distancing. However, its publisher, David Ben Hooren, said many Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn and Queens believe they have been unfairly targeted with stringent restrictions that aren’t being enforced elsewhere.
“The Jewish community feels they’re being singled out and there’s some element of anti-Semitism,” he said Monday. “Not that I agree with it, but that’s the sentiment in the street. Tensions are running high.”
Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, said a majority of the Orthodox Jewish community “is determined to do what is necessary” to combat the coronavirus, and adherence to health guidelines has become “much more common.”
He said his organization is discouraging family outings and gatherings this week as Sukkot continues. “People must comply with any governmental directives that are aimed at curbing spread of the virus,” he said.
Cuomo, at a news conference Monday, displayed images of large gatherings of Orthodox Jews and warned that he might close some religious institutions if their leaders did not abide by restrictions. He and de Blasio also are considering ordering the closing of some nonessential businesses in the hot-spot areas.
The latest developments have rekindled friction that surfaced in March and April, when some Orthodox neighborhoods in and around New York City were hit hard by the coronavirus. Hundreds of people died or were hospitalized, and lockdowns closed many Jewish schools and businesses.
In April, de Blasio oversaw the dispersal of a big Hasidic funeral in Brooklyn and took heat over a tweet warning “the Jewish community, and all communities” against large gatherings. Some community members accused him of a double standard because of his support for gatherings linked to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Why the upsurge? Some residents cited the return of Orthodox families from summer getaways at the shore or in the Catskill Mountains, and the recent reopening of some Jewish schools. Shafran said some community members, after the springtime outbreak subsided, lowered their guard with less wearing of masks and social distancing, and resumed exchanging of hugs with extended family.
Motti Seligson, media relations director for the Hasidic movement Chabad-Lubavitch, said friction between New York’s Hasidic communities and the city Health Department had been simmering for years.
One long-running dispute involved the city’s efforts to restrict a specific circumcision procedure used by some Orthodox communities, claiming that it posed a health risk.
In 2018 and 2019, measles cases spread in Orthodox communities in New York as well as other regions. As ripples of anti-Semitism surfaced, some Orthodox leaders felt the Health Department should have focused more on working with the affected communities and less on scolding them.
“There’s a lot of trust that has been eroded over a decade,” Seligson said. “You need much greater integration with these communities — flood them with outreach, speak to every synagogue, every doctor.”
Asked about such criticisms, the Health Department issued a statement from Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi saying: “Wherever we have gone, we have worked hand-in-hand with the community and we will always work to build trusted partnerships so that everyone knows how to protect themselves.”
Sarah Horowitz, a Hasidic resident of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, was angered by the possibility of new restrictions and what she felt was the heightened scrutiny of her community.
Already, she said, she has been struggling to find the right balance of work and parenthood now that her 9-year-old daughter’s private school has been shut down because of the virus.
“Everyone is frustrated,” she said after de Blasio’s announcement. “We all feel targeted by the mayor. We just want our lives to get back to normal. … It’s like we are living under a black cloud.”
To an extent, the friction in New York mirrors developments in Israel, where the ultra Orthodox have been criticized for ignoring safety rules and crowding into synagogues even as the country battles a new COVID-19 outbreak. Israel’s coronavirus czar says the ultra Orthodox, who are about 10% of the population, account for around 40% of the new cases.
(AP)
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19 Responses
After having totally screwed up in the early months of the Pandemic, both Cuomo and deBlasio have now gone overboard in their efforts to aggressively respond to the recent spike in the infection rate. Their mutual animus makes it even worse. At the same time, the infection rates in these neighborhoods has been much higher than the City average for several weeks and they’ve been warned several times that there would be a lockdown if compliance rates with masks and social distancing didn’t improve immediately, a warning some observed but many didn’t. In this case the frum mosdos, rabbonim and askanim have done all they can to promote compliance but apparently many just don’t care.
A very famous quote comes to mind, We have met the enemy and he is us. You can call Cuomo and Deblasio anti semites. You can say there is double standards. The fact is most non jews are wearing masks and jews are not. Why do we have to stand out and be different? Why do we have to be on the national news? I was at an Irgun Shiurei Torah shiur today Rabbi Bald Shlit”a was giving out masks to anyone who didn’t have. Because his rebbe said everyone should wear a mask. Why aren’t other gedolim, manhigim exhorting their followers to wear masks? If they are you don’t see it in the street. Last week when Deblasio threatened to shut us down I began wearing my mask again. I didn’t want it on my conscious that a yeshiva or shul should have to close or a store to lose parnasa because I didn’t want to wear a mask. I saw many people begin wearing masks, but most are not Why not?
We’re masking up and curbing gatherings for our own safety – and have been doing so for weeks already. However, it’s worth considering that if the Governor hadn’t fought to keep our summer camps and synagogues closed for political reasons, and the Mayor hadn’t closed our neighborhood playgrounds while ignoring crowded Manhattan parks, then maybe our community would be quicker to trust their judgement.
And of course….
Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that we didn’t wear masks, continued eating herring in shul or sharing towels in Mikva.
Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that when we did wear mask it was only on the street to hide from the media and politician but murmured that “really” it doesn’t matter.
Of course it has no connection to the ideas our community keeps preaching that doctors don’t know what there saying, scientists change their mind and Dr. Fauci is only here for politics.
It only has to do with antisemitism, we are being targeted here and in Israel, In Montreal and in Antwerp. They hate us because we’re Jews, be use we’re religious, because we’re white, necuse we’re straight and because we’re trump supporters.
Now our stupidity is national news. Now our pictures are on CNN and on Drudge Report. Now we’re trending on twitter.
Now is a good time to go to a tisch.
What a kiddish hashem.
And….
We will continue.
We will continue to shape the conversation around how stupid de Blasio is, how liberals hate religion, how Cuomo neglected nursing homes.
We will do everything to distract ourselves from our stupidity and neglect.
We will do everything so we should not have the time to asks ourselves, how is it that the smartest of nations and most intelligent of people acted and acts so carelessly in regards to it’s own specie?
Is it really because we’re close knitted communities? More then anyone?
Is it really because the target us? All over the world? Falsifying data?
Or perhaps we have done something wrong?
Are we fighting an outside enemy or perhaps an inside enemy?
Do we have a disrespect for rules on genarel?
Do we resent authority?
Can’t we except that someone outside our circle knows something?
Do we have trouble being adaptive, because it’s “not normal”?
Do we think that really, really we already know everything?
Where did we go wrong?
The obvious antisemitism is based on a FACT: Cuomo said a month ago that he will only close schools if the infection rate is above 9%.
See, the ‘problem’ is that we as orthodox yidden are the only people who actually have a concept of community- we get together thrice a day for davening with minyanim, not to mention many other aspects of community. Which other sect in the world gathers daily together? And if it’s actually airborne (which today it is believed to be), then its inevitable that regardless of masks and distancing, covid will spread thru minyanin. It’s coming out as discrimination but should actually be depicted with admiration. Follow all protocols and guidelines, but keep in mind there’s an excellent reason for this uptick in our communities, not that we are all disregarding laws.
Just beautiful. Way to go. As if we don’t have enough Tzaros in our lives, Shanda!
So the frum community in Brooklyn is dying out, leaving landlords and sellers desperate. Can I get an nice three-bedroom (or more) apartment in the heart of Boro Park for under $1000/month? How about a nice detached house near shuls, three to five bedrooms, for under $100K. I assume jobs are plentiful since so many workers have expired, and parking won’t be a problem once they haul the abandoned (by their late owners) cars.
Or perhaps, this epidemic is a lot of scary hype, and not the real thing? As the goyim say, the proof is in the pudding, so far the major damage from Covid19 is governmental oppression.
how do we know that the problem is the orthodox jews ? it’s the goyim that live in these zip code that are causing the spike. what arrogance from these mamzeirim ‘thinking’ of closing yeshivas and shuls. what are they? kings?
just strip them of this unlimited power.
BS”D
Thank you Akuperma. I enjoyed your post.
There is no way for the public to know what percentage tested positive.
The mainstream media reported coast to coast, people who gave in their contact info at covid testing sites, but left without giving a specimen, were informed that they tested positive.
@Ah yid: I dont know which cave you are living in! I ventured out of Lakewood to spend the first days in NY. Expecting to find Jews w/o masks and non-jews wearing masks, i was in for a surprise. just as many percentage -wise non jews were not wearing masks if not more non-jews than Jews. So thanks for hating us as much as Coumo and DeBlasio. Pls dont call yourself Ah Yid. I think Ah Self-hating Yid would be better.
Before addressing any of the substance and specific points made in either the article or any of the comments that have been posted thus far, a word of concern, if I may, over the style, tone, and most of all the language of many of the latter. The name-calling, insults, crudeness, and sometimes even vulgarity found in so many of the comments? Does anyone actually believe that any of these strengthen one’s arguments, or enhance one’s credibility? Does anyone think that such adolescent antics, vices and crutches reflect well upon or foster goodwill and respect toward Orthodox Jews (or any subset thereof)? That they create, facilitate or encourage a kiddush Hashem? That they serve us constructively in any way?
I would add, as well, that the repeated invocations and charges of antisemitic persecution (HaShem yishmoreinu) are also (whatever else they may or may not be) neither helpful nor befitting here. To be effective, credible, and worthy of response, arguments should be limited to those based upon facts and logic.
I don’t know why we have to see here all kinds of bad words statements of our precious am yisroel? don’t we see and hear enough by the goyim? why don’t we focus on all our chesed and mitzvos we do? on all the torah we learn. yes, we make mistakes! yes, we try our utmost! and yes there will always be people that are not going to listen. but to talk with such hate and anger on our fellow jews is not going to help. we are in galus and no matter what the only thing that will help us is DAVENING that everything should work out for the best!!!!
I like the rage.
It is like a fire becoming stronger before dying down, like a kid throwing his greatest tantrum before giving up.
We are almost there, hopefully in a short while we will start being honest not only about the flaws of the mayor but of ourselves.
We ruined our communities. We killed our people. We acted neglectful. We didn’t listen. And we suffered and are still bearing the consequences.
Someone wrote “how do we know that the problem is the orthodox jews ? it’s the goyim that live in these zip code that are causing the spike.“
Why do goyim ALL OVER The world near orthodox neighborhoods suffer from an uptick? In Israel? ln BP? In Williamsburg?
Why do the same people who don’t adhere to any of the medical guidelines suffer an increase? Is it a coincidence?
In the article it states: “The Jewish community feels they’re being singled out and there’s some element of anti-Semitism,”
Really???antisemitism???
Just like everything now is racism? Just like saying some negative about Michelle Obama is anti women?
It sounds like we all wore masks, kept social distancing and out of nowhere, boom! There coming after us!
Well, if masks are really effective, why close the schools and businesses? Just wear masks and live happily ever after.