Manhattan, NY – In The City Just The Lower East Side Doesn’t Have An Eruv

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    Manhattan, NY – Strung together out of poles and wire, is the symbolic boundary known as an eruv by a group of rabbis who decided last fall to extend an uptown Manhattan eruv southward.

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    Formerly, the eruv had run from 125 Street to 56th Street; by summertime, it will stretch to Houston Street.
    But one area conspicuously left out of the eruv is the Lower East Side. And some in that neighborhood are asking, why not us?
    Juda Engelmayer, the owner of Kossar’s Bialys, a 70-year-old bakery, said he had seen the local Orthodox community dwindle. And if they build an eruv “People will say, ‘Hey, I’ll come down here, there’s an eruv, I can carry,’ ” Mr. Engelmayer said. “And maybe a community would grow down here again.

    But unlike most other Manhattan neighborhoods, the Lower East Side has traditionally shunned the eruv.
    “It’s like a taboo word,” said Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, manager for religious life at the N.Y.U. Jewish center, who helped organize the eruv’s extension to Houston Street. “There are strong voices on the Lower East Side who are opposed to putting up an eruv, and we didn’t really have an interest in butting heads with them.”

    The strongest of the anti-eruv voices was once Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who was considered by many the leading authority of his time on Jewish law. Rabbi Feinstein, who died in 1986, believed that no eruv could ever be erected in Manhattan – the island’s street layout and traffic patterns made it impermissible, he said – and his influence was such that it was unthinkable for any Lower East Side rabbi to contradict him.

    “Rav Moshe was the rule, and when it came to Jewish law, no one could touch Rav Moshe’s toenails,” said Azriel Siff, the rabbi at Chasam Sofer, a synagogue on Clinton Street. “As a result, the Lower East Side never had an eruv and never will have an eruv.” Nor, he added, does it need one: “The Lower East Side survived for hundreds of years without an eruv.”


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