Members of the Tribe by Zev Chafets

Author:Zev Chafets [Chafets, Ze’ev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79920-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

HARD CORE

A few days after my visit to Beth Elohim I took a train down to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see Warren Feierstein again. I had been on the road for months by now, and had met a bewildering array of Jews—crawfish eaters and politicians, yuppies and welfare cases—all the way from the Succah in the Sky to the lesbian Havdalah hot tub. They had only one thing in common—they seemed like Jewish Americans. Now I wanted to meet American Jews, the hard core who still cling to the old Eastern European attitudes and traditions. Feierstein, who grew up on the Lower East Side, suggested I start in his neighborhood.

When I found him in his office at the Metropolitan Council on Poverty, his desk was stacked high with official-looking papers, and a walkie-talkie crackled from a shelf. Feierstein gestured at the receiver. “I’m a member of Hatzollah,” he said proudly. “And we’re always on duty.”

If you have the misfortune to need an ambulance in New York City, it could take as much as forty-five minutes for one to reach you. But if you are Jewish and live on the Lower East Side or in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx, you can do a lot better than that. Call the right number, ask for help—in Yiddish, Hebrew, or English—and Hatzollah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance corps, will be at your door within ten minutes. “We’re like the Red Magen David,” Warren said, naming Israel’s national emergency first aid service. “Except, with all due respect, I think we’re a little more efficient.”

Hatzollah was not established only for the sake of efficiency, however. “There are a lot of people in our community who don’t know English well, and they have a hard time communicating with paramedics,” Feierstein explained. “And let’s face it, a lot of them, when they need help, they want to see a Jewish face, to feel like they’re with their own people.”

This is the essence of the Lower East Side mentality. There are about thirty thousand Jews left in the neighborhood—shopkeepers and blue collar workers, teachers and social workers, gentle Hebraists and karate-chopping Jewish Defense League militants—and they are indivisibly Jewish. They don’t need trips to Israel or UJA sensitivity sessions to tell them they are different from their fellow Americans. To them assimilation is a dirty word and the opportunities of the United States a mixed blessing.

Warren strapped on his walkie-talkie and took me out for a tour of his neighborhood. We walked along East Broadway, a street lined with kosher restaurants, religious bookstores, and more synagogues per capita than any other place in America. On one block, between Clinton and Montgomery, I counted twenty shuls and yeshivot—all of them Orthodox. Feierstein told me there isn’t a single Reform or Conservative congregation in the neighborhood, a claim not even the Chasidic strongholds of Borough Park and Crown Heights can make.

By far the most influential religious institution on the block is the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem Yeshiva, which was the home base of the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.

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