• The Arab League’s mandate to monitor Syria expired yesterday. Activists hope the U.N. Security Council will step in. [WP]

• Rabbi Dov Linzer reads the Talmud and shows that it is up to men to deal with sexual urges prompted by women rather than, as in Haredi communities, to force women to dress modestly to prevent such urges. [NYT]

• The Chinese premier finished his Gulf trip, signing new energy deals potentially in the hopes of avoiding future U.S. sanctions over buying oil from Iran. [WSJ]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshal will reportedly not run for re-election. [Haaretz]

• The recent spate of anti-Semitic vandalism in Borough Park, Brooklyn, has traumatized the community. [NYT]

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

My father is gimp-legged after he was hit by a car 30 years ago, but he lives a surprisingly nomadic existence in the greater New York area, often reaching all of the city’s five boroughs and many of its suburbs in a single day of rabbinical work. He drives a sporty, silver, late-model Cadillac, and frequently, at day’s end and too far afield to eat at home, he winds up in a kosher restaurant. One might think him to be a kosher-restaurant connoisseur, but he tends not to pay them any mind. In fact, my father’s dining preferences range from deli to dairy, and not much beyond that. My earliest memories of eating with him were in his haunts on the Lower East Side—Sam’s 999 on Essex Street, where he’d order pastrami and a Heineken, and Steinberg’s upstairs dairy restaurant, where he’d have smoked whitefish, coffee, and cheesecake for dessert.

On Christmas Day four years ago, after we had chosen the hat, we then had to choose a restaurant. Did we want milchig or fleishig, dairy or meat? We chose an upscale dairy restaurant. The restaurant was packed with late lunchers like us. There were mothers with strollers and finger-fed babies. Toddlers ate baked ziti, indolent children ate white rolls with butter, and businessmen nattered on at corner tables over lox and sable. My father and I stood for 20 minutes until a table opened near the swinging-door entrance to the kitchen. Then we sat there for another 20 minutes until service arrived. The waiter, who looked like an apparatchik for Josef Stalin, took our order.

My father took out his reading glasses to study the menu, even though he knew what he wanted. “Smoked whitefish,” he told the waiter.

“What else?” the waiter asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” the waiter said, incredulously.

“You have decaf?” my father asked.

“No. No decaf,” said the waiter.

“Mushroom barley soup?”

“No. Split pea only.”

“Potato salad?”

“No.”

“Tuna salad?”  I asked.

“We’re out.”

“Egg salad?”

“Blintzes only, with sour cream,” he said. “I have to get to other tables. Make up your mind.”

“OK,” I finally said. “Split pea soup and a vegetable omelet. Can you bring my father a seltzer?”

“No seltzer,” the waiter said.

A restaurant with no seltzer? I began to consider the idea that our waiter had traces of sadism. He was short and stout and had the air of someone who had been humiliated often, probably in a faraway land. I thought of him as one of those nondescript soldiers you see in newsreels from a forgotten conflict, like the Russo-Finnish war, perhaps a private in charge of the horses or the latrine. And to deprive my father of seltzer, if indeed he were doing so, was cruel. My father’s love for seltzer cannot be understood in purely physical or even gastronomic terms. It is simply part of him, long fetishized by his digestive track. Still, what was there to do?

We sat for another 20 minutes waiting for our food. It wasn’t a big deal: The restaurant was busy. My father and I passed the time in small talk. We made calculations on our napkins, refinancing our mortgage payments and family budgets. When our portions arrived, we ate silently and, in my father’s case, industriously—storing up glucose for whatever intellectual, physical, and monetary challenges lay ahead.

Then it was time for dessert. It would be cheesecake. Because we were sitting near the kitchen, I had a glimpse of a platter of store-bought cheesecake slices. There were regular, marbled chocolate, and blueberry cheesecakes. While I was in the restroom, my father ordered plain cheesecake. Upon my return, I urged him to reconsider, telling him the marbled chocolate cheesecake was much better, and he agreed. I called to the waiter. “My father changed his mind,” I said. “Instead of the New York plain cheesecake, he wants the marble chocolate cheesecake.” The waiter looked at us in disgust and said, “Once I put in the order, I cannot change it.”

He then spun away and returned shortly with a plate of the plain cheesecake. My father, who had spent his childhood in the Bronx, knew how to be grateful for food and to those who made it. His grandmother kept a carp in the bathtub to make gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and live turkeys occasionally appeared in their apartment to be slaughtered. But here, my father was surprised and annoyed that he was not permitted to have what he wanted for such a niggling and inadequate reason. Never one to make waves, though, he picked up the fork and ate the cheesecake like a boy fearful of offending his mother. “It was good cheesecake,” he said. “But not as good as the marble cheesecake would have been.”

The waiter brought the check, and my father again put on his reading glasses to study it. He took out his credit card. “Are you going to tip this monster?” I asked him. “Well,” my father said sheepishly, “not that he deserves any, but something I suppose.” I said that I wouldn’t tip him at all. My father considered this for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “Ich kenne nichts,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t do it. I can’t take away his parnassah,” his livelihood.

Centuries of pious passivity had become the gravity that kept my father connected to his loved ones and to his work. His attachments were carefully sewn and cherished, sometimes overly so. To ask my father to withhold the tip was in effect to ask him to depart from a worldview that had kept him going for years. My father’s father was an immigrant house-painter who was both sustained and oppressed by slum lords, painting closets and hanging wallpaper for $20 a room. The fact that my father had ascended the economic ladder enough to drive a Cadillac would only intensify and amplify an indictment of his soul should he withhold the pay of a working man to teach him a lesson about courtesy and civility.

“But Dad,” I said. “This man mistreated us. He was abusive.”

“What should I tell you?” he said with the air of a man who had been asked to do something soul-damaging, like slaughter a calf or put a horse to sleep. “You’re right, but I can’t do it.”

In the face of mistreatment, my father could do nothing, as his father before him could do nothing when his clients decided cavalierly to pay him less than the agreed-upon fee. And standing there in front of my father, with a 150-year potpourri of Jewish piety and passivity—and of honor and dignity—between us, I too could do nothing but, in effect, turn the other cheek on Christmas Day.

They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.

The driver, the article states, did not intervene. The World explains further:

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

According to the New York Post, “Signs written in Hebrew and English direct women to use the back door during busy times.”

What remains to be determined, and likely will be—the Department of Transportation has launched an investigation—is whether a private bus company that provides a public service (and pays the city to do so) largely serving a religious community is exempt from anti-discrimination laws.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line [New York World]
‘Back of bus’ furor [NYP]

McCann hints that the insanity defense is in the offing (which should certainly resonate to anyone who has read Aron’s jailhouse interview). But judging by this exchange, she should hope for a jury that is not composed of Aron’s Lubavitcher peers: “In her trial preparations, she has learned about the Hasidic community in Borough Park and has also learned a new word,” reports the New York Times. “‘Shiska,’ Ms. McCann said, mispronouncing the Yiddish word, shiksa, for a non-Jewish woman.”

Ironically, mispronouncing Yiddish words is one thing that makes shiksas so totally hot.

Defending the Accused, and Herself, With Vigor [NYT]
Earlier: A Community to Be Proud Of, a Death to Mourn
Missing Hasidic Boy Found Murdered
Levi Aron’s Interview From Rikers

Sentencing Lebovits to the maximum term of up to 32 years in jail, DiMango told the courtroom that both the victim, who was a recovering drug addict, and Lebovits, who had been abused as a boy, epitomized “the ultimate harm and havoc” of sexual abuse. At the time, Lebovits was one of a string of men who had been hauled before a judge on what seemed like an almost monthly basis to face charges of sexually abusing boys. By last spring, the Brooklyn District Attorney had indicted and prosecuted almost 30 men over a period of about 18 months, many of them teachers and rabbis, in what was perceived to be a crackdown on abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world.

Then, this April, without warning, Baruch Lebovits walked out of jail.

Lebovits was free on $250,000 bail following the arrest of a rabbi, Samuel Kellner, on charges of bribery and witness tampering. Kellner was charged with giving a boy—not the boy who addressed the court, but another alleged victim—$10,000 to falsely testify he had been abused by Lebovits and of threatening to bring more victims forward unless the Lebovits family paid him $400,000. Today, the matter is still unresolved.

Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes told a press conference that he remained confident the victim whose testimony secured Lebovits’ conviction—the young man who had addressed the court—was telling the truth and that Lebovits would return to jail. But, regardless of the outcome, the episode represented a major setback for Jewish victims of abuse.

For the past few years, survivors’ advocates have been chipping away at the communal wall of silence that has surrounded abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world and at the various halakhic justifications that have been given for dealing with the issue internally through Jewish courts, known as beit dins. The allegations that now complicate the Lebovits case epitomize some of the worst fears within the community: that the so-called victims are liars, that the secular authorities do not always get the right man, and that, without rabbis as a firewall, innocent people can be publicly shamed and put in prison.

There is little doubt, even among leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, that sexual abuse of children is a serious problem. As more victims and their families have come forward in recent years, reports of abuse have proliferated. Dov Hikind, a state assembly member whose district includes Borough Park, claims to have gathered material on hundreds of such cases, largely from personal testimony.

The more pressing issue is how to solve that problem. Victims’ advocates and law-enforcement officials continue to urge survivors to report cases to social services or the police. But some leading rabbis in ultra-Orthodox communities like Borough Park continue to insist that adults who suspect abuse must consult a rabbi before reporting it to the authorities. Earlier this month, Agudath Israel of America, the top Orthodox rabbinic authority in the country, released a statement instructing its followers that only a rabbi can decide whether there is enough suspicion in each case to override the Jewish law of mesirah, which prevents Jews from reporting each other to the secular authorities.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, Yeshiva University’s spiritual adviser and a prominent advocate on behalf of survivors, said Lebovits’ harsh sentence followed by the allegations of witness-tampering and bribery would only make a mistrustful community even more suspicious. “We are dealing with an element within the Orthodox community that feels American society is not their friends,” said Blau. “One would have to think that anything that increases that fear is just going to make it more and more difficult to work with them in future.”

In the wake of Lebovits’ release, at least one advocate did not do his cause any favors. Rabbi Nachum Rosenberg, who regularly uses YouTube and a recorded telephone line to rail against abusers, sided with Kellner. In a telephone interview days after Kellner’s arrest for witness tampering, Rosenberg said that he did not know whether Kellner was guilty. “I wasn’t with him at the time,” he said. But shortly afterward, he asserted that the allegations against Kellner were false. “It’s a 100 percent hoax,” he said, before launching into a tirade against Hynes, which included the accusation that the D.A. turned a blind eye to abuse in return for favors from the strictly Orthodox hierarchy. (The D.A. declined to comment on this and other issues related to Lebovits’ case.)

Kellner denies the charges against him. Nevertheless, many advocates are wary of springing to his defense. One, who did not wish to be named, called Rosenberg’s allegiance with Kellner “unfortunate.” “You can’t maintain credibility in these cases by refusing to hear people are behaving badly,” the advocate said.

If Rosenberg comes out of the episode with his reputation diminished, then the D.A. fares little better. During Lebovits’ trial, his family claimed the accusations against him were financially motivated. Yet the D.A. appears to have done nothing to follow up on those claims.

Instead, Lebovits’ defense team hired a private detective to gather the evidence that eventually led to Kellner’s arrest. That detective, Joe Levin, was quoted soon after Lebovits’ release, on the blog Failed Messiah, saying that despite the material he gathered against Kellner, he still believed that Lebovits was guilty. But in a more recent interview, Levin claimed that he was misquoted. “He is clean,” Levin said of Lebovits.

What is clear is that Lebovits’ case highlights just how complex sexual-abuse prosecutions can be. Victims, often as a result of the trauma they have suffered, frequently appear in court with convictions for drug use or petty crime. Victims’ advocates can be erratic and prone to see conspiracy at every turn. Abusers often turn out to have once been abused themselves. Last year, Lebovits’ defense team was joined by the high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has called for a new trial. But Lebovits’ fate seems to rest on Kellner, whose next court date, a hearing, is currently set for September 6.

Paul Berger, a staff writer at the Forward, is the co-author or contributing editor of seven books. He has also written for the New York Times, the Daily, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Clarification, August 23: The phone conversation between reporter Paul Berger and Joe Levin, the private detective hired by Lebovits’ defense team, during which Levin said that Lebovits was “clean,” took place in April. Since then, Levin twice declined to comment further on the Lebovits case. In an interview with Tablet Magazine today, Levin said that he had made the original comment in haste, that he had not been misquoted on the Failed Messiah blog, and that he did not wish to talk further on the record because both the Lebovitz and Kellner cases are still open.

In 1984, Mondrowitz was accused of sexually abusing four Italian boys. Since then, the number of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims has been estimated at close to a hundred—making him, shockingly, an average pedophile. But given the shame and secrecy surrounding sexual abuse, and his broad network of contacts, the number of alleged victims could actually be much higher. Moshe Rosenbaum, one of the activists who first aired concerns about Mondrowitz in the late 1980s, estimates the number to be 300. If Mondrowitz were to be convicted of so many crimes, he would be the worst sexual predator in the Orthodox community on record.

But that would require a case to be brought against him—which, for a variety of troubling reasons, has never happened.

This fall, the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, will hear oral arguments pertaining to the release of documents about Mondrowitz. Michael Lesher, an attorney representing several of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims, asked the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office for the documents under New York’s Freedom of Information Law in 2007. A trial court initially ruled in favor of Lesher’s clients, but that verdict was overturned unanimously last year on appeal.

The fact that the Court of Appeals will hear the case is a significant victory for Lesher, who believes that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes stopped pursuing Mondrowitz, who’d fled to Israel, because of pressure from ultra-Orthodox voters. Although it seems that Mondrowitz could have been extradited to Brooklyn to stand trial as early as 1989, Hynes’ office waited two decades, until 2007, to launch the extradition process. Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, said that if Mondrowitz ever returns to the United States, he will be arrested and tried. “We don’t reveal files on open cases, and courts have upheld that,” he said. “I know we have handled this case properly.”

Lesher disagrees and is looking for a smoking gun to prove his theory. But even if he is wrong about Hynes, the Mondrowitz case—or non-case—has involved a series of brilliant two-steps on the part of a community that is looking to face its demons quietly. But the story, in part due to the complexities of extradition, simply won’t go away.

***

Mark Weiss, who is represented by Lesher, is one of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims. Today, he is a frequent speaker at Jewish sexual abuse conferences; in 2006, he appeared on a Nightline segment about Mondrowitz. In 1980, he was a 13-year-old in Chicago—a good kid with some philosophical differences from his ultra-Orthodox parents. “I didn’t see eye-to-eye with them,” he said last month by phone from New Jersey. “But I wasn’t stealing cars or taking drugs.” When his junior high school asked him not to come back, his parents sent him to a psychologist in Brooklyn named Avrohom Mondrowitz.

The Weiss and Mondrowitz families were friendly. They had lived close to each other in Chicago. Mondrowitz’s father was a popular figure in the community, both a scholar who studied in the Mir yeshiva and a businessman in charge of several nursing homes. According to a family friend from the neighborhood, the senior Mondrowitz was part of the group of Mir students who escaped Poland before World War II through Shanghai, China. Avrohom, who was born in 1947, moved to New York in the late 1970s to be closer to the Ger Hasidic community in Borough Park. By the time Weiss was sent to Mondrowitz, the older man had already established himself as a psychologist whose patients came to him through a wide network in the Orthodox community, including the Ohel Jewish social service agency, according to the Orthodox Jewish website Vos iz Neias? and other leading members of the community. (Ohel has publicly denied employing Mondrowitz but is more circumspect about referrals. “Given the lapse of time, it is impossible to determine whether any referrals were ever made to Mondrowitz,” a spokesperson said.) Mondrowitz agreed to treat Weiss by taking him for a week into his Borough Park house. Unknown to Weiss’ parents, Mondrowitz’s family was out of town, which left him alone with the teenaged Weiss.

Weiss remembers Mondrowitz as a dazzling figure. “He was just the essence of coolness, especially for a little yeshiva kid showing up,” Weiss told me. “He wined and dined me. He took me out to eat. He took me out to an amusement park. He basically showed me a good time and gave me lots of positive attention. I soaked it up. He was grooming me.” At night, Weiss said Mondrowitz gently persuaded him to sleep in Mondrowitz’s bed. (He declined to go into detail about what would happen next, but he alleges sexual abuse.) “He was very smooth and manipulative and really gave me no pause for thinking anything was inappropriate,” Weiss said. His descriptions are similar to those of the five other alleged victims represented by Lesher, none of whom are named in the appeal.

Part of Mondrowitz’s appeal relied on the stigma toward mental health professionals in the Orthodox community. “He had this reputation of being a wonderful guy and being very helpful,” said Deborah Dienstag, a physician who works with the Orthodox community. “People don’t want to go to psychologists, since there’s stigma. There is no stigma going to rabbis.” According to Jeff Dion, of the National Center for Victims of Crime, an advocacy group, certain abusers set themselves up as pillars of the community, targeting victims who are troubled, outcasts, or young people with drug and alcohol abuse problems. If a victim then chooses to disclose acts, he said, “it becomes the word of a ‘bad kid’ against the pillar of the community.”

In the years following Weiss’ visit, Mondrowitz’s star rose. He hosted a popular program called Life Is for Living on the now-defunct local radio station WNYN. “Don’t picture this man living in isolation or even living a double life,” said Lesher, the lawyer. “Don’t picture someone who was off in the corner abusing kids who came to him. He was very industrious about bringing victims to him and integrating himself into the institutional structure that made it possible. He founded a school. He got victims through the school. He ran a psychology practice and promoted it with a radio program. He got hundreds of kids.”

***

For years, no Jewish victim spoke out against Mondrowitz. But accusers say he also went after Italian boys on his ethnically mixed Brooklyn block; residents recalled him showering gifts on the neighbors’ kids. In 1984, someone made an anonymous phone call to two New York Police Department detectives, Pat Kehoe and Sal Catalfamo.“I never had received a call like that in my whole career in the New York City Police Department,” Kehoe told ABC News. “There was a rabbi and gave the name and he was abusing people on this block. And he said if you go knocking on doors, you’ll find victims.” Both detectives are now retired and, through another police officer, declined to talk to me about the case.

Responding to the tip, the detectives went down the block, knocked on doors, and quickly located four Italian victims who were willing to press charges ranging from sexual abuse to sodomy. “When people finally went to the police, it was the Italian kids,” Lesher said. “Several victims have told me that their parents were instructed not to approach the grand jury. Some victims were discouraged from reporting Mondrowitz’s crimes. I can only assume the rest were, also.”

Continue reading: the community’s response, extradition, and “the guy who broke the ice.” Or view as a single page.

Among those who stopped by yesterday were Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “This is one of the most sad days in this city. Very tragic,” Bloomberg said afterward. “The commissioner and I expressed our condolences to the parents and grandparents and siblings, and there’s not a lot else we can say. I don’t know why God sometimes does some things, but it is what it is, and I think we all should, before we go to bed, take a look at our children and realize how lucky we are to have them.” An unsubstantiated cellphone picture shows Bloomberg and Kelly, both donning kippot, sitting at a table with Nachmen Kletzky, Leiby’s father.

The community continues to feel as though this death were personal. Said Binyomin Ginsburg, who traveled from Minnesota to pay his respects, “We’re supposed to comfort the mourners, but in a sense, everybody coming is a mourner. We’re all mourning this child.”

Bloomberg, Kelly Visit With the Kletzkys [Vos Iz Neias?]
From Around the Country, Thousands of Mourners Pouring In to Kletzky Home [CBS/Vos Iz Neais?]
Earlier: A Community To Be Proud Of, a Death to Mourn

Between this email and the news that hundreds of volunteers had poured in to help the Shomrim, the police, and eventually even the FBI canvass Borough Park and other parts of Brooklyn, it seemed clear that the Internet was being used to mobilize an already astonishingly mobilizable ultra-Orthodox community—one already related to Orthodox communities outside of Brooklyn. Given the historically complex relationship that the fervently observant have to technology—paradoxically both early adopting and often enduringly resistant—it was hard not to feel a sense of pride and, against evidence already mounting to the contrary, a tiny sliver of hope. This community was using all available tools to do what every community was meant to do: care for its own.

Which is why I gasped yesterday when I read that investigators believe it may have been this very asset—the efficient, powerful activation of up-to-date resources—that caused the suspect in Leiby Kletzky’s murder to panic and kill the child.

I had been sure that nothing could worsen the discovery that an 8-year-old walking home alone from camp for the first time in his life, lost and surely already scared, somehow managed to stumble into the confusing, frantic world of a deeply disturbed man; but it is simply unbearable to imagine that his parents, and the scores of police officers, canvassers, and prayer-givers who sought to help the parents might be made to believe that they had, however inadvertently and with whatever great intentions, played a role in his death. The injunction at last night’s funeral, in which one speaker “reminded the community to be careful, urging the adults to protect their children from strangers,” must have stabbed the hearts of Leiby’s parents, who allowed their child a small measure of freedom with the most unthinkable of consequences. It is a lesson embedded in Orthodox life, one for which the religious are routinely dismissed as backwater provincials. Yet this morning, it is hard not to sympathize with the insular-minded. Would contracting one’s world prevent tragedies like Leiby Kletzky’s murder? Tell me where to recycle this computer.

Let me be the one to say it: This act of violence was utterly unforeseeable—the random result of a set of cascading tragic coincidences. If the picture being drawn by investigators is true, Leiby Kletzky’s parents, however ravaged by guilt they undoubtedly are at this moment, did nothing wrong, and anyone who claims otherwise is a sinner of the first order. These two adults were engaged in that delicate dynamic that turns parenting into an art: the alternating two-step of protecting a child while slowly, thoughtfully allowing him progressively wider experiences of independence. That a madman allegedly stepped into this dance was a terrible fluke—or even, if you’re so inclined, an act of God. But as far as we mortals are concerned it was not the result of the Kletzkys’ misjudgments, and their son’s murder must not be turned into an excuse for self-punishment. Trying to make sense of this story is an understandable impulse, but it is deeply misguided. And there are, without question, enough victims already.

Ha’makom yenahem etkhem betokh she’ar avelei Zion v’Yerushalayim.

7 Blocks To Walk, Brooklyn Boy Never Got Home [NYT]
Leiby Kletzky Murder Suspect Levy Aron Confesses to Authorities [ABC]
Police, Hundreds of Volunteers Search for Missing Brooklyn Boy [NY Post]

I’m not a lonely old man living alone in the middle of nowhere. I am a 36-year-old New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, and I have many friends scattered throughout the five boroughs. It’s just that I’m not used to meeting neighbors and sharing no more than vague and grudgingly polite pleasantries with them. Where I come from—the Hasidic communities of Borough Park, Brooklyn, and New Square and Monsey, N.Y., northwest of the city—the neighborly indifference that most New Yorkers are used to doesn’t exist.

In the past, each time I moved to a new home my fellow Hasidic neighbors came knocking. They brought piping hot pans of potato kugel, plates of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and rolls of cinnamon cake. Then they would ask for my name and occupation and spend a few minutes trying to place me within an appropriate sphere of mutual friends, relatives, and acquaintances. In my case it was usually, “Deen? I don’t know any Deens, but I know a Deem. You sure your name’s not Deem.” I was sure it wasn’t.

Several years ago, I decided to discard religious observance and the austere lifestyle with which I was raised. I left my long black coat and black hat to gather dust in the storage room of a friend’s basement along with a small collection of religious texts and audio-cassettes of old Talmud lectures. My ex-wife and five children moved to an apartment in New Square, and I rented a small apartment not far from them, on the outskirts of Monsey. I wanted to live close to my children and my siblings and their families. I also found it comforting to remain living among Hasidim, even though I no longer lived like them. If others thought them freakishly stuck in 18th-century Poland, I thought visiting 18th-century Poland was just fine as long as the kugel was hot and the neighbors lent a hand when my car battery needed a boost.

However, seduced by lower rents, cool bars, and the prospect of being closer to friends in Brooklyn, I decided two years ago to move to Bushwick—Brooklyn’s newest bastion of hipster faux-bohemianism. There are many many differences here, of course, but I was most struck by the standoffishness of my new neighbors. It started the first day, after I parked my rented U-Haul in front of my new apartment and unloaded the last items from the truck. I was sitting on the stoop for a quick cigarette, and just as I crushed the butt underfoot, three of my upstairs neighbors stepped out of the building, two of them outfitted in vintage sneakers and plaid shirts, with scraggly bed-head hairdos. The third had long bleached-blond hair and black leggings and carried a beat-up guitar case.

I smiled and introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Shulem. Just moved in.”

They gave me limp handshakes, mumbled their names—the bleach blond, I remember, was, Brian—and took off.

Later that night, I was kept awake until 4 a.m. by the guitar-playing in their apartment, which was directly above mine. I wasn’t disturbed by the music. Instead, I wondered how I might join their jam session. But these people and their ways were strange to me, and I imagined a conversation stunted by our lack of common interests. The more prudent approach, I decided, would be to make their slow and steady acquaintance.

Two months passed, however, and the hipsters on the third floor had yet to make another appearance. Weren’t they curious, I wondered, who I was, or if we had any mutual friends or relatives? Granted, it was unlikely, but how did they know?

One day, I sat on the front stoop and ached for some casual neighborly conversation. From the corner came two young guys in white shirts wearing backpacks, who, for a moment—and I don’t know why—I imagined were lovers. As they came within earshot, they gave me friendly smiles. One of them offered a cheery “Hi.” They turned out to be Mormon elders. Whatever, I thought, and decided to engage in a theological debate. But the elders didn’t know why one should take the Bible as the word of God other than the fact that they fervently believed that one should. Then they offered me some pamphlets and went on their missioning way.

I went back to thinking about my upstairs neighbors. I craved for a more substantial engagement with them, but they always flitted by, and the opportunity seemed maddeningly elusive. A friend, another ex-Hasid who lived several blocks away, suggested they might just be very quiet hipsters, that he knew plenty of hipsters who were perfectly friendly, and besides, there was no such thing as a hipster. “Call it what you will,” I said, “but I’ve got some pretty strange neighbors. And Mormons they’re not.”

Several more months passed. My upstairs neighbors appeared rarely, and when they did we exchanged the briefest and most reticent of pleasantries. I couldn’t explain why I thought about them; it wasn’t that I needed friends. I just wanted some of the old inappropriate nosiness, dammit.

Of course, I could’ve initiated some nosiness of my own. I could’ve discarded the advice a secular friend once gave me regarding the non-Hasidim of New York: You’re allowed only two questions for every one statement. Secular people, I was told, don’t take kindly to interrogations. Unlike Hasidim, who will ask a dozen or more deeply personal questions within 60 seconds of meeting you—including, among other things, your amount of credit card debt and the amount you receive in food stamps—non-Hasidim, I was told, prefer small talk on topics of no real concern to anyone: the long line at the bagel shop, the odd smell on the subway platform, annoying Park Slope mothers.

Eventually I gave up. I’d hear my neighbors on the staircase in the hallway, or I’d see them chaining their bicycles to the second-floor guardrail, and if I said, “Hi,” I got a “Hi” in return, but never more. If I made a remark about the weather, they said, “Yeah.” If I said their party the other night sounded like fun, they said, “Yeah. It was pretty dope.” (Dope? Where were these people from?) If I remarked that someone really ought to stop keeping the outside door open, I got an odd look followed by another “Yeah.”

Halloween came around, and a friend and I were leaving for a party when one of the neighbors passed in the hallway wearing an assortment of odd garments in a variety of colors.

“Are you a hamburger?” my friend asked.

The neighbor suddenly turned. “Yes!” she said. “You realized! That’s so cool!”

My jaw hung open. It wasn’t exactly a conversation, but it was certainly more than the usual monosyllabic response. But before I could say anything she was down the stairs and out the door.

The next day, outside on the front stoop, the girl appeared again, this time sans costume.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re the girl with the hamburger costume.”

“Yeah,” she said, and walked off.

Shulem Deen, a former Skver Hasid, is the founding editor of Unpious.com.

Reporter Josh Gleason shadowed Twersky during much of the first year on his own. Here is Gleason’s portrait of a young man searching for work and housing, exploring online dating, and seeking a community to replace the one he lost. [Running time: 23:16.]

Last Wednesday, the New York City Council voted to approve an eight-block rezoning that holds as its centerpiece a proposed 17 buildings of affordable housing. Known as the Culver El Estates, the plan includes 68 apartment units to be built by the Orthodox Jewish community that inhabits the area, Borough Park. Unlike most of New York City’s 178,000 public housing units, which average two bedrooms, a majority of the units at Culver El will consist of four- or five-bedroom apartments—intentionally large dwellings to fit the family size of the ultra-Orthodox.

The developer of the Culver El project is the South Brooklyn Community Organization, an arm of the umbrella Hasidic organization Agudath Israel, which, according to a spokesman, has developed more than 300 affordable housing units in New York—most of which have been heavily subsidized by federal or state funds. But this new rezoning initiative, some non-Orthodox residents claim, arrived abruptly, with little word of its development outside the insular Orthodox community, even though it occupied a large, central location in an ethnically diverse neighborhood.

“It’s built for a population―a subset of the population―in the neighborhood,” said area resident Liena Zagare, who blogs about the neighborhood at The Kensington Prospect. “That doesn’t seem right.”

Of the 130,000 families on the waiting list for public housing apartments, according to the city’s Housing Authority, only half a percent request four or more bedrooms, which cost $523 a month in Brooklyn. (Most applicants are waiting for studio apartments with rents starting at $288 a month.) Of course, the number of rooms in a housing-project unit is not alone an indicator of discrimination, and the gaudiest Borough Park abodes are still dwarfed by the towering apartments of Manhattan elites. But in the current tight housing market, large apartments designed for a certain community’s lifestyle can be enough to bring the case to court and test the political muscle of well-organized and connected Orthodox groups.

According to the people behind the Culver El development, the arrival of the project was anything but abrupt. For them, it was a long march through the bureaucratic machinery and neighborhood politics of New York, dating back to 2001, when they brought their proposal to the district’s city councilman. Before then, Orthodox housing projects in the city had met very little resistance.

***

Even by urban standards, Borough Park contains an exceptionally high population density. The maternity ward at the Maimonides Medical Center, in the heart of the neighborhood, delivers more babies than any other hospital in the state.

A report, released last year by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, identified the neighborhood as one of the city’s most “severely crowded.” But Borough Park is also home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States, a highly observant Orthodox community that clusters its housing around synagogues. The community’s growth has been at the root of a wave of construction projects that has transformed the shape and texture of the neighborhood, pushing the metric known as “median rent burden,” or the fraction of income spent on housing, there to first in Brooklyn, while its income lags behind the rest of the borough.

These pressures—crowding, high prices, and exceptional religious needs—have forced many Orthodox families out of the neighborhood to New Jersey and suburbs elsewhere in New York State, where they aren’t always welcome. Transplanted Orthodox families—in towns upstate and on Long Island—have faced hostile disputes with local populations over housing, said Steven I. Weiss of The Jewish Channel, which regularly covers housing issues. In 2000, the city council in Tenafly, New Jersey, voted to prohibit lechis, the posts ultra-Orthodox use to form an eruv, a physical enclosure, on the Sabbath. Orthodox Jews ran into similar hurdles in the Hamptons, where, two summers ago, residents vigorously opposed construction of an eruv. In the Town of Ramapo, a suburban hamlet in Rockland Couty, New York, locals were irate when new Orthodox residents successfully lobbied for revisions to local zoning laws. “You wonder,” one woman asked The New York Times, “how can someone drop their own little planet on us?”

So far, these tensions have stayed outside New York City’s borders. But as the Orthodox population grows, that may be changing.

“There is no long-term, broad-based disregard for Orthodox neighbors anywhere in Brooklyn akin to what we’ve seen in some American suburbs,” Weiss said. Orthodox residents in Borough Park are a well-established part of the fabric of New York City life, and these housing projects are extensions of their community’s needs. The developers see themselves as the premier providers of affordable housing in their areas and natural advocates for the ultra-Orthodox, who make up an overwhelming majority of the Jewish residents in the neighborhood. By and large, city agencies, particularly under the pro-development Bloomberg Administration, agree. And city officials—eager to attach their names to any affordable housing project—willingly accommodate the particular housing requests of this rapidly growing population that votes in big, organized blocs.

Even if this voting dynamic does not hold, particularly with younger, more independent Orthodox voters, it’s still the reigning conventional wisdom. “I think it’s perceived to be a well-organized vote, and I think politicians respond to well-organized votes,” John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University of New York, recently told The Forward. For Orthodox leaders pushing political initiatives in the city, success depends on keeping their numbers high.

Over the past two decades, housing developments in Borough Park have sprouted as rapidly as the population, and most projects are completed swiftly. In 1992, the city created a special ordinance for the neighborhood that relaxed zoning restrictions, allowing buildings to expand to cover 65 percent of their lot in high-density areas. Between 1996 and 2003, the average number of new housing permits issued in Borough Park was nearly five times greater than in neighboring districts. For the ambitious Culver El development, South Brooklyn Community Organization got subsidies from the New Foundations Program, New York City’s 2000 initiative to promote homeownership. Under the program, city-owned property is doled out to private developers who promise a third of the units—handed out via lottery—will meet certain affordability standards. (SBCO said Culver El will have apartments available for families that make roughly $50,000 to $90,000 a year.) City subsidies are repaid by the developer over time, with incentives built in for occupancy. To alert local residents to the newly available housing, developers are required to advertise in one of the city’s metro dailies, a community paper, and what the law calls an “ethnic newspaper.”

In 2005, Michael Bloomberg officially announced the Borough Park rezoning plan that paved the way for Culver El Estates. And on May 12, 2010, the development won the approval of the city’s Planning Department. A month later, the community board approved, with only two members objecting. One of those no votes was from Maggie Tobin, who lives near the project and said the rezoning squanders a chance to create more open space in the densely populated neighborhood. (The rezoning plan passed in the City Council allocated $600,000 to renovate the nearest park and expand open spaces.) “If there’s enough room for 68 units,” she told me, “it pretty much sounds like there’s going to be a lot of kids there. You can do the math.”

***

The Culver El project is not even the only Brooklyn site causing controversy for this reason. A few miles north, in the Williamsburg neighborhood, a development of 1,895 units of mixed-income housing, known as Broadway Triangle, is facing legal hurdles. Unlike the publicly subsidized, privately built Culver El project, Broadway Triangle is a proposal of the city’s Housing Authority, which administers all the public housing in the five boroughs.

The United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg, a Hasidic service agency with close ties to local Assemblyman Vito Lopez, Brooklyn’s county Democratic leader, won the development rights to Broadway Triangle. UJO secured the development without competitive bids, a rare maneuver that did not go unchallenged. Several local Latino and African-American churches and nonprofits partnered with two area Orthodox organizations, the Central Jewish Council and United Jewish Community Advocacy Relations and Enrichment, to actively oppose the development. The group, called the Broadway Triangle Coalition, has worked primarily with the aid of Brooklyn Legal Services to mount legal challenges to UJO’s project. The building’s apartment sizes and layout—with most apartments, especially those on the lower floors not requiring use of a Sabbath elevator, counting four bedrooms or more—favor the Orthodox, this group claims, and are tantamount to discrimination. If the city is going to offer “affordable housing,” the group argues, then it should be affordable to everyone.

But the main objection to the project is political, explained Martin Needelman of Brooklyn Legal Services. “It’s not just the division of the apartments,” he said of motivation for the lawsuit,” but the process that led up to it that excluded every group that is not aligned with the UJO.”

Last December, the New York City Council approved the Broadway Triangle project by a 36-10 vote. Immediately after the vote, the coalition filed a discrimination lawsuit in a State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman upheld the suit, issuing an injunction to halt the development’s construction. And on May 20, Goodman blocked an attempt to have the suit thrown out. “With such negligible demand for large apartments as compared with smaller ones,” wrote Goodman, “it is questionable why in such a daunting housing crisis, there is so powerful a commitment, with funds, to construct only large, and, therefore, fewer, apartments.” In June, the coalition rejected an offer by the city to settle the lawsuit. Then, on October 13, Goodman suspended the suit in response to a pending federal investigation of Lopez and his nonprofits, an inquiry that will seriously hamper the development from moving forward. So goes the turf war, in court battles and counter-accusations, gaining and giving ground one project at a time.

***

This past August, Rabbi Chaim Israel, the housing development director for the South Brooklyn Community Organization, showed me the Culver El site. Bodegas nestled beside Bangladeshi bazaars and kosher markets in the close-packed storefronts. Standing across from his development’s future home, Israel described the situation as he saw it. “Large families are living with a very unique problem,” he said. “No one wants to rent to large families.” He pointed out another housing project managed by SBCO four blocks away. The units, built nearly two decades ago, still had 95 percent of the original homeowners, he claimed proudly. With Culver El, he wants to invite those formerly denied the opportunity to “join the homeowning society.” When pressed, though, Israel batted away assumptions that units would go exclusively to Orthodox Jews. “They will,” he said of the neighbors hailing from Pakistan, Mexico, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, “have the opportunity to buy just like anybody else.”

Mark Bergen writes about public policy and lives in Chicago.

The comment, delivered as it was among Orthodox rabbis and Jews old enough to remember the black-Jewish Crown Heights riots of the mid-’90s (and to remember that Giuliani’s predecessor as mayor was David Dinkins, who, like Bloomberg challenger Bill Thompson, is black), drew the expected fire from Thompson’s campaign, but also from Brooklyn City Councilman Bill de Blasio, who told the New York Times that Giuliani was on the “verge of race-baiting.” Even Giuliani’s admiring biographer, the conservative historian Fred Siegel, was appalled. “It’s smart to have Rudy out there, but not in this way,” Siegel told the New York Observer. “You want a positive appeal to draw ethnic voters to the polling place. But the overtones here are double-edged.” Siegel also said that Bloomberg’s follow-up to Giuliani’s remark—to compare New York to Detroit, where “gains are always in danger of being turned around”—was neither “neither morally defensible nor politically sensible.”

Stumping With Mayor, Giuliani Stirs Old Fears
Siegel: ‘Neither Morally Defensible Nor Politically Sensible’

A Jewish Mystic Offers Amulets and Predictions, for $180 a Pop [Forward]

Guss’ Pickles Packing Up for Brooklyn [Bowery Boogie]

At a superstore in Borough Park, Brooklyn, one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel, I examined the immaculate shelves of tzedakah boxes, candlesticks, seder plates, spice boxes, wine goblets, havdallah candles, and every other piece of Jewish paraphernalia ever made in Israel or China (including a kosher version of my favorite childhood board game, Candyland). My older sister, Alyssa, had wandered off in search of challah covers and I wanted just a bit of kitsch for myself, something by which to remember this pilgrimage we’d made. Eventually I settled on a circular refrigerator magnet which reads, with a strikethrough to emphasize the point, Just Say No to Yetzer Horra. “What does yetzer horra mean?” I asked Alyssa. “Doing evil,” she said. “Cool,” I said. I am all for eliminating evil-doing.

My sister became religious six years ago, a ba’al t’shuvah, as they are called in the community (or, as our dad says, “a born again Jew”). In the most literal translation from the Hebrew, she is a “master of return.” We grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was the one who cut Hebrew school to hang out with her goth friends and listen to Eurotrash music; I was the one everyone thought might end up a rabbi, given my status as vice president of our temple’s youth group and my faithful attendance at Friday night services. But through a series of events—many Shabbat meals at a Chabad house, a six-month trip to Israel—Alyssa gradually committed herself to a religious life. Now, she was marrying another ba’al t’shuvah. She called him her beshert, her “soulmate” or “destiny.” We were in Borough Park that day to find her a wedding dress: the perfect high-necked, long-sleeved gown that didn’t look too, well, high-necked and long-sleeved.

It is only the extremely affluent of religious—or frum—families who purchase brand new gowns for their brides-to-be. The less wealthy rent gowns, but even that is still rarely done. Most often, prospective brides obtain their modest dresses at a gemach. Gemach is the Hebrew acronym for gemilut chassadim, acts of loving kindness, according to biblical standards. Once upon a time the four corners of a ready-to-be-harvested field were reserved for those without grain; today there are gemachs for money, power tools, furniture, computers, medical equipment—just about everything that might be needed in the commercial, familial, and religious spheres of a community. A gemach can be a “shop” in someone’s home, a service available via the Internet, or, most commonly, a loan that occurs when word spreads that, for instance, someone’s friend’s cousin needs a particular object.

Wedding gown gemachs often fall into the first category. They are hidden in the back of large houses or apartments, occupying makeshift closets that hold sometimes fifty or more dresses, most of them collected through donation. The women who run them do so as a service to their communities; they tend to be skilled seamstresses who, given that a single dress might be worn by dozens of brides, tailor and re-tailor garments to make them fit every imaginable shape and size (sometimes adding entirely new fabric to accommodate more ample figures). Usually, when a bride visits a gemach and selects the gown she’d like, a simple paper agreement is filled out, stating the date of the loan and sealing a promise that the borrowed item will be returned in still-wearable condition; the bride, or kallah, then pays the cost for cleaning and any materials needed to make alterations, but the dress is otherwise free of charge, hers for the day. Shortly after she wears it, the dress is returned, and back to the closet it goes—unless, of course, it’s scheduled for another wedding shortly after, in which case it is immediately re-tailored, cleaned, and sent back out.

On the morning of our dress search, it had been raining and the dresses in the first two closets we rifled through felt damp to the touch. Many of them were soiled, which did not deter my sister, and were covered in lace and beads, which did. For the sake of my fashionable mother, who had been relieved that I was accompanying my sister, I pushed our kallah along to a third home.

A woman who was easily a great-great grandmother—slightly hunchbacked, barely five feet tall—answered the door. She eyed my sister in her calf-length skirt and long-sleeved jacket, and knew immediately what we’d come for. We followed her through a dusty, cluttered foyer, into a small, unfinished room at the back of the house, empty except for a cracked full-length mirror, a tiny stool, and a score of gowns hanging in a doorless closet. The room was dark—its few windows streaked and dirty—but not dark enough to hide the ugliness of the gowns. We skipped quickly through puffy sleeves, quadruple-tiered skirts, and flashy bodices that seemed weirdly suggestive for a population concerned with modesty. Then we spotted it: a simple dress adorned at the top with white embroidered flowers and fitted to the hips, where it descended in a long, full swish of ivory embroidered with more white flowers. My sister slipped the gown on, and I caught a stale, flowery scent; its previous wearer had been heavily perfumed.

Alyssa scrutinized her appearance in the mirror. The gemach woman nodded her head. “Yes, yes. This one is very popular.” I stood behind my sister thinking of the heat she would endure in those layers of taffeta, in August. The dress was perfect, but it would be so much more perfect if they could just cut the neck down a bit and maybe make the sleeves three-quarter length. “Do you want it?” the woman asked.

My sister looked at me and then at the mirror again. “I think I do,” she said finally.

“Good. This one is called ‘Schwartz,’” the woman said. “I’ll get the papers.”

“Why ‘Schwartz’?” I asked, unable to keep myself from laughing. The name seemed to lend the dress a strange personality, as if it were the hapless central character of a mediocre novel. Of course its name would be Schwartz. Or Cohen.

“The last girl who wore it—she was Schwartz,” the woman said. “That’s how I keep track.” After my sister wore the dress, it, like her, would take on a new name.

Alyssa examined her reflection for a final moment. “So this one is beshert?” I asked. She nodded. She was already a little overheated, her cheeks flushed a deep pink, her brow beaded with sweat. And then I smiled at her. “It looks beautiful on you,” I said, because, whatever my feelings about the length of the sleeves, what really do I know about destiny?