Dov Hikind, a former New York Democratic assemblyman, excoriated fellow Orthodox Jewish New York City residents who continue to ignore social distancing regulations while the coronavirus pandemic spreads.
“Most people are doing everything that needs to be done, following all the rules coming out of Washington and coming out of New York,” Hikind told the Washington Examiner. “But it doesn’t take that many to cause chaos. It doesn’t take that many who don’t follow the rules. Who think they’re talking to a higher authority.”
The warnings carry particular weight from Hikind, an outspoken Democratic member of the state Assembly for 36 years, ending in late 2018. Hikind, 69, represented broad swaths of the Orthodox Jewish community and is himself religious.
“If you congregate and there’s a funeral, there’s hundreds of people. If there’s a wedding, hundreds of people show up,” he said. “And when there’s a synagogue, you’ve got to pray, hundreds of people go to the synagogue and pray. You are going to murder people, ultimately. That’s what you’re going to do. People are going to die.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio cautioned that synagogues that violate coronavirus regulations and hold services would be shut down permanently. Although the majority of synagogues have complied with the orders, others remain open, holding minyanim, prayer services consisting of 10 worshipers or more.
“We’ve had extraordinary, across-the-board rabbinical support from all the different elements of the Jewish community, and the same is true of other faiths as well,” de Blasio said in his press briefing last Friday.
“A small number of religious communities, specific churches and specific synagogues, are unfortunately not paying attention to this guidance even though it’s so widespread,” de Blasio said.
Additionally, some synagogues have offered daily morning mikvehs, ritual full-immersion baths usually used by Orthodox communities for the purpose of congregants to achieve purity.
Hikind was shocked to hear about one prominent Brooklyn rabbi who conducted mikvehs in a Borough Park shul.
“I received this call yesterday from somebody who cares deeply from the community that people are going to this mikveh, and I was ready to go to the police, and I have, by the way, but I call the rabbi. I had a conversation with him. He told me that a doctor in the community told him it was okay,” Hikind recalled.
“Then he said to me, ‘But I limit it — the number of people who can go to this mikveh.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really? How many people do you permit at one time?’ And then he said to me, ‘Only 20 at a time.’”
The infection and mortality rate as a result of the coronavirus among the Orthodox communities is not just skyrocketing in Brooklyn but in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Israel’s Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak.
Israeli authorities, however, established a containment zone around the town of Bnei Brak and imposed an injunction similar to the U.S. “stay at home orders,” enforced by Israeli law enforcement.
The circumstances leave the American Jewish community, which has suffered from a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, from 2019’s Tree of Life synagogue shooting massacre to an uptick of violent assaults on Jews in New York City and New Jersey, in a tenuous situation.
