How the Mayor of New York Helped Brooklyn’s Jews to Observe the Sabbath

Nov. 30 2022

At city hall on Monday, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams signed a Jewish legal contract, along with an official proclamation, that will make Sabbath observance significantly easier for the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews who live in Brooklyn, New York—and especially the ḥasidic enclave of Borough Park. The documents establish an eruv, an elaborate legal fiction consisting of a “wall” that gives the area it encloses the status of a private courtyard in which carrying out of doors, normally prohibited on Shabbat, is permitted. Yehudit Garmaise writes:

A new eruv surrounds all of Borough Park, and most of Brooklyn. . . . While the first part of completing an eruv is building and repairing the eruv’s “doors” and “virtual walls” the second part is that the city’s mayor or police commissioner must rent the eruv to the Jewish community, Rabbi Eli Uminer, [a member of the committee that oversees the eruv], explained.

While in the past, the city had given the Jewish community a verbal agreement, today at City Hall, Mayor Eric Adams completed the project by signing a 99-year lease for one dollar, “to allow carrying in the boundaries of the eruv in accordance with Jewish law,” the mayor’s signed proclamation said.

“It was very nice that the mayor took the time to host us and to make the eruv for us,” said Rabbi Uminer, who was at City Hall today along with other Brooklyn Eruv Vaad [council] members.

Read more at BoroPark24

More about: American Jewry, Brooklyn, Halakhah, Shabbat

The Mass Expulsion of Palestinians Is No Solution. Neither Are Any of the Usual Plans for Gaza

Examining the Trump administration’s proposals for the people of Gaza, Danielle Pletka writes:

I do not believe that the forced cleansing of Gaza—a repetition of what every Arab country did to the hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews in 1948— is a “solution.” I don’t think Donald Trump views that as a permanent solution either (read his statement), though I could be wrong. My take is that he believes Gaza must be rebuilt under new management, with only those who wish to live there resettling the land.

The time has long since come for us to recognize that the establishment doesn’t have the faintest clue what to do about Gaza. Egypt doesn’t want it. Jordan doesn’t want it. Iran wants it, but only as cannon fodder. The UN wants it, but only to further its anti-Semitic agenda and continue milking cash from the West. Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians blame Palestinians for destroying their countries.

Negotiations with Hamas have not worked. Efforts to subsume Gaza under the Palestinian Authority have not worked. Rebuilding has not worked. Destruction will not work. A “two-state solution” has not arrived, and will not work.

So what’s to be done? If you live in Washington, New York, London, Paris, or Berlin, your view is that the same answers should definitely be tried again, but this time we mean it. This time will be different. . . . What could possibly make you believe this other than ideological laziness?

Read more at What the Hell Is Going On?

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Palestinians