“DO NOT test your child for Covid.”
So began a text that recently circulated on the messaging platform WhatsApp, among yeshiva parents in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. The note advised them to keep sick children at home but to “indicate they have a stomachache or symptoms not consistent with Covid.”
Any admission that their children were feverish, coughing or exhibiting other signs associated with the disease that has killed more than 200,000 Americans might eventually force a school to close for some period of time and it was “up to parents” to make sure such an outcome was avoided.
Stealth strategies were not going to work, however. A few days after the text had made the rounds — on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, as it happened — the New York City health department announced that Covid-19 was growing at “an alarming rate’’ in several neighborhoods, most of which contain significant Orthodox populations. These areas were outpacing the citywide average by close to four times the rate.
Even in advance of Yom Kippur, and out of concern that the holidays would loosen any resolve around social distancing, Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened further lockdowns and restrictions if behaviors around Covid rules did not change. On Sunday he acted on those warnings, announcing that he would shut down all nonessential businesses and schools in nine ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens, including the yeshivas that offer religious education to tens of thousands of Jewish children in New York.
The complications for these parents are enormous, given that many large Hasidic families live in small, cramped apartments, typically without internet access and often with just a landline. Learning remotely would be a disaster for these children.
“Without that access and many times with no landline, there might be families with a dozen children in an apartment and no real opportunity for remote learning,’’ Lani Santo, the executive director of Footsteps, an organization that helps former members of Orthodox groups, told me.
Hasidic Jews came to New York in large numbers after the Second World War and have prized an insularity that the pandemic is now unraveling. For decades, the political class has given this ultra-Orthodox community broad autonomy in exchange for its service as a reliable voting bloc. Now the high costs of that fragile contract are becoming clear, and the consequences for the rest of the city are potentially grave. Of the 300 schools to be closed under the mayor’s order, 100 of them are public.
Health crises of this scale leave little room for ideological accommodation. To combat them effectively requires a trust in civic leadership that has frayed in the Orthodox community in recent years. Finding an alignment around safety could hardly seem more urgent; failing to suppress these micro outbreaks could easily drive the citywide infection rate past the point at which the mayor has said he would shut down all public schools, only now chaotically reopening.
Beyond all the obvious risks of a migrating virus are threats to social welfare that remain just as troubling. Since the virus emerged in March, it has both provoked and accompanied major civil tensions. It has been a vector for rage. Any inability to contain an outbreak originating in several places among a single ethnic group — in this case a religious minority, traditional in its habits, resistant to science and government intervention — was in danger of feeding existing prejudices, of escalating animosities and division.
For weeks preceding the mayor’s shutdown, the city had been working on outreach efforts in the concerning neighborhoods, efforts that in some cases, seemed to lack the sensitivity and attention to difference that was necessary. Into mid-September, there were no Yiddish speaking contact tracers employed by the city.
As important as disseminating information in Yiddish is, the language is not universally spoken in every Orthodox community. At one point, the city was blasting announcements in Yiddish in neighborhoods in Queens, where Russian, English or Hebrew would have been more appropriate. On Twitter, Daniel Rosenthal, a state assemblyman representing the area, asked for someone to please tell the mayor that “not all Jews speak Yiddish.”
Mr. de Blasio has a long history with the Orthodox in Brooklyn; as a member of the City Council, he represented Borough Park. He had their support in his mayoral bids and even in his presidential run. But in the background, David Zwiebel, a prominent national spokesman for the Orthodox community told me, there were many who were wary of Mr. de Blasio’s vocal branding as a progressive, a term that the community regards with suspicion.
Early in the pandemic, hundreds in the Orthodox community died of Covid-19, and when the death of one rabbi in April drew crowds of mourners in disregard of the lockdown, the mayor showed up at the funeral himself, enraged, to make sure they dispersed. He then produced a series of angry responses on Twitter and elsewhere, igniting the community’s backlash.
More recently, Rabbi Zwiebel said, after a meeting between religious leaders and city officials that the rabbi felt ended in a spirit of collaboration, came what were viewed as bullying emails with threats about further shutting down yeshivas. Clearly there were problems of sensitivity and tone.
Without the cooperation of religious leaders, who seem to have the only true sway over their constituents, there is little hope of changing direction. There are encouraging signs, like an internal push for more testing in the community: flyers in Yiddish went up in Brooklyn, alerting people to testing sites, and rabbis issued warnings about the perils of large gatherings.
But the city’s outreach efforts were clearly not hitting all their targets. Last week, I spent several hours walking around the Orthodox parts of Williamsburg, and most of the men, women and children I saw walking around were not wearing masks.
Two city workers had stationed themselves on Bedford Avenue and were handing out protective gear to anyone who wanted it, but they did not speak Yiddish. Some who passed by accepted the offer; others did not. People without masks poured out of stores — and in one instance out of an urgent-care facility offering free coronavirus testing — even as nearly every window had a sign reading, “Masks Required.”
When I asked a young mother coming out of a shop why so few people were wearing masks, she said that I was mistaken, that many people were wearing them. She then reached into her handbag and put one on.
In his press briefings over the past few days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo stressed the matter of enforcing safety measures, like mask ordinances, across all demographics. This, he said, was up to the local officials — in the case of New York City, that meant the Police Department, hardly a model of mask compliance — who were not working diligently enough.
“I understand the sensitivities of this political environment and no one wants to enforce a law, because then you make the other person unhappy, and nobody wants anyone unhappy,’’ the governor said. “You know what makes people really unhappy? Dying makes people really unhappy.”
By the end of the week, he announced that any failure to enforce emergency regulations around masks, social distancing and capacity limitations in designated “hot spots’’ would leave local governments with fines up to $10,000 a day.
The problem is that enforcement in a “hot spot’’ can quickly look like profiling.
When I was speaking with Rabbi Zwiebel late one evening this week, Mr. de Blasio called on the other line, and the rabbi ended our conversation. Governor Cuomo and his health commissioner, Howard A. Zucker, have also been talking to religious leaders with the hope that they can influence new habits, critically during Sukkot, the annual celebration of the harvest taking place this week.
One crucial message that has yet to be received, Dr. Zucker said, is that herd immunity is a myth in these communities. Many in this part of Brooklyn believe that because the Orthodox were hit so hard by the virus this spring, they must have already been sick, and that the crisis has passed. This, according to public health officials, is simply not true.
In a community that prizes seclusion and remains averse to technology, information has a tendency to spread very slowly, which has presented another challenge to keeping the virus at bay.
Rabbi Zwiebel has a partner in Talmudic scholarship with whom he speaks most mornings. The other day his partner asked him why, suddenly, so many people were wearing masks in Borough Park. He had no idea that the virus had wormed its way back.
"again" - Google News
October 05, 2020 at 03:40PM
https://ift.tt/2GqQ8i4
When Covid Flared Again in Orthodox Jewish New York - The New York Times
"again" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YsuQr6
https://ift.tt/2KUD1V2
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "When Covid Flared Again in Orthodox Jewish New York - The New York Times"
Post a Comment