Last week, police in Stamford Hill—a ḥaredi neighborhood in London—broke up a wedding with some 400 attendees, held in blatant violation of social-distancing regulations. Meanwhile, many Ḥaredim in Israel have refused to follow lockdown regulations, and in recent days some have rioted in response to attempts at enforcement. Natan Slifkin, a devout Jew with close ties to Israel’s ḥaredi world, commented on Orthodox resistance to coronavirus-related regulations in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle:
[L]arge indoor gatherings are fundamental to ḥaredi and especially ḥasidic communities to a degree that the rest of us cannot even begin to grasp. The yeshivas and the synagogues are the primary focus of people’s lives and keep them in the safety of religious frameworks. . . . Thus, the strategies for fighting COVID-19 would exact an enormous toll on the ḥaredi way of life.
But there’s more. For Ḥaredim in general and Ḥasidim in particular, identifying and fighting against threats to their way of life forms a major part of their identity. They will do it even when there is no particular innate reason because of the benefits that fighting [against external threats] brings to reinforcing their identity. As a ḥaredi leader in Israel once said, “If the government tells us to study [the talmudic tractate of] Bava Kama, we’ll study [tractate] Bava Metsia!” . . . And as much of a problem as this in the UK and U.S., it’s a vastly bigger problem in Israel.
To Eli Spitzer, an active member of the British ḥaredi community, this analysis may explain, at least in part, the situation in Israel, but has little relevance to that in the U.S. or the UK:
It is absolutely true that there is a large and very vocal ḥaredi minority in Israel for which almost any conceivable issue can be weaponized in the [putative] struggle for the soul of the Jewish people between Zionism and Torah. [Sizable segments of Israeli Ḥaredim] really do think they are fighting a centuries-long struggle by refusing to wear a “Zionist” mask. In Stamford Hill no one thinks like that. Over the past year—and there’s no point in denying it—I have seen no end of obliviousness to public-health regulations: not one person has ever [defended] this obliviousness in terms of “fighting in the resistance.” [against Zionism, secularism, or the Gentiles]. The very idea is surreal.
As I have tried, largely in vain, to explain before, the evolution of the ḥaredi response to COVID-19 over the course of the year has a much more mundane explanation. In mid-April Stamford Hill Ḥaredim were actually very scared [so they stayed at home. However, like ḥaredi communities in New York, they were too slow off the mark and, being situated in a global center of commerce and travel, COVID-19 ripped through the community. The reason why they subsequently went back to normal life is because, having experienced COVID-19, they decided that it wasn’t worth upending their lives over.
Read more on Eli Spitzer: https://elispitzer.com/2021/01/28/charedim-and-covid-19-response-to-natan-slifkin/