End of an Eruv

Written by Megan Brown

Glance up towards the stoplights and fire escapes of New York, and witness the familiar sight of battered sneakers swinging like a lazy pendulum. Observe a line of pigeons, elbowing each other with their spotted wings, poised to drop a small mess on unsuspecting passerby. Now notice a thin, unassuming piece of string, stretched above the chaos of off-duty cabs and crowded tour buses.

The string looks suited to entertain a cat or be tied around a finger as a reminder. But in actuality, it is part of the Manhattan Eruv, a boundary that allows some of New York’s most observant Jews to carry out Shabbat with greater ease.

For nearly half a century, rabbinic authorities considered the entire island of Manhattan to be surrounded by a natural eruv. But after re-examination of the structure this year, New York rabbis concluded that the natural eruv was no longer ‘kosher,’ and that the whole island was no longer enclosed.

The Torah forbids Jews from carrying objects outside the home, or private domain (reshut hayachid), on Shabbat. “Carrying” includes pushing a stroller or toting a religious book. An eruv, whether it be natural (like a mountain) or man-made (like a string), creates an expanded reshut hayachid within which things can be carried, making transporting children and house keys, for example, permissible on Shabbat. Orthodox communities across the world employ eruvim.

In 1959, Menachem Kasher, a New York rabbi, declared that the sea walls and piers surrounding Manhattan constituted a suitable eruv, making the entire island a reshut hayachid. For reasons that remain shrouded in the mists of time, various smaller eruvim were constructed within the sea wall eruv. However, it was not until June 29th, forty-six years after it was first recognized, that natural erosion of the underwater eruv led rabbis to declare it unacceptable.

“The Manhattan of 1959 is not the Manhattan of 2005,” said Adam Mintz, rabbi of New York synagogue Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, located at 241 West 72nd Street, and a member of the group of rabbis who declared the borough-wide eruv defunct.

“In the last couple of years it’s come to our attention that the sea walls are not the same as they were,” Mintz said.

Without the larger barrier, Manhattan Jews are forced to rely on a smaller, more traditional eruv, constructed out of “strings and poles,” as Mintz wrote in an e-mail to his congregation.

The barrier extends from Midtown Manhattan up as far as Martin Luther King Boulevard on some of the West Side, but ends just north of Central Park for the most part. Its western border is the West Side Highway, and to the east, the FDR Drive.

Esther Kustanowitz posted Mintz’s e-mail on her blog, My Urban Kvetch, along with links to a map of the new limits and an expansive definition of eruvim.

The change in the eruv boundary will affect her if her friends who observe the eruv are affected, Kustanowitz said. “A string around the city is not going to uproot people from their homes. They’re going to find a way to make it work,” she said when asked if she believed people would move to live inside the eruv.

“Our situation is pretty much unchanged,” says Rabbi Jonathan Glass of his congregation, the Civic Center Synagogue, which gathers at 49 White Street in lower Manhattan, well below the southern tip of the surviving eruv.

“People in this neighborhood are growing in their religion,” Glass said. “We deal with a very large spectrum of observance.”

To that end, Glass said that the eruv change would not be “announced from the pulpit,” but he did stress that it was not because of a “lack of respect” towards the decision.

If the eruv change has negatively impacted a Manhattan Jewish community, Mintz is not aware of it, he said. However, the change has made people interested in the eruv from a “cultural and religious standpoint,” he said.

In fact, in some unexpected quarters, the eruv has been generating significant new interest. After learning of a project by French artist Sophie Calle in which she examined private and public spaces in Jerusalem, Elliott Malkin, an artist who uses technology as a medium, began to research eruvim.

“I’m Jewish and I had never heard of an eruv because I’m reform and I’m not very religious,” said Malkin, who recently graduated from New York University after completing work in an art/technology program there.

After learning about eruvim, Malkin decided to retrace a short-lived eruv that a rabbi identified on Manhattan’s East Side in 1907. The rabbi, a Polish immigrant, declared that an eruv was formed by water on three sides of Manhattan and by the Third Avenue elevated train tracks on the forth. Other rabbis and the Jewish community largely disagreed with this assessment.

Malkin posted semacodes, which are like barcodes that hold more information, along the now-destructed Third Avenue El route. Pedestrians with camera phones that contained the right software and an internet connection were able to photograph the semacodes, and be guided to webpages with information about the eruv. His project is called eRuv: A Street History in Semacode.

“When I first discovered the eruv, I was interested in three things,” said Malkin.

“It mixes public and private space together,” Malkin listed first.

Second, “it mixes church and state,” he said, citing legal battles in other American cities, such as Palo Alto, Calif., where the greater community objected to the construction of an eruv.

Third, Malkin said, “It mixes the real with the symbolic.”

“It’s a psychological boundary,” Malkin said. “It’s like a political boundary, like the border between Egypt and Sudan. It’s just desert, a line in the sand. They only exist if you build a wall, like the Great Wall of China or the wall being built around Israel.”

“It’s a symbolic boundary,” Malkin said.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.