Rabbi faithfully tends the ‘doors’ of Squirrel Hill
Bright sun blasted the windshield. In his glove box was a pseudo-industrial pair of sunglasses — the kind one might wear for an extended dental procedure. The rabbi lifted his hat and put them on. Better to see the eruv.
The eruv is a technical and symbolic enclosure, a kind of end run around the prohibition against Jews carrying anything from a private space — a home, for example — into a public space on the Sabbath. The day of rest should be free of such work as pushing a stroller or carrying food to a neighbor’s house, according to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
To enable Shabbat adherents — most of whom are Orthodox, but also some Conservative Jews — to bring their reading glasses and babies to synagogue, ancient Jewish religious thinkers divined a way to unite different structures and the streets that connect them inside a wall, thereby designating the entire enclosure as one private space.
While an eruv could be a fence erected specifically for that purpose, most modern eruvim (that’s the plural) rely on utility poles to represent door frames and the wires that run between them as crossbeams. Natural features, such as rivers and hills, can serve as boundaries.
“It’s almost like a loophole, right?” Rabbi Silver said, though he clearly didn’t agree.
The Pittsburgh eruv stretches from Schenley Park to Regent Square and from Browns Hill Road to the northern portion of Wilkins Avenue. The Tree of Life synagogue, where a shooter executed 11 Jews attending a Shabbat service on Oct. 27, is just within its boundary.
On the first Thursday after the shooting, Rabbi Silver needed a police escort to do his weekly inspection within that synagogue’s roped off area. An enclosure within an enclosure.
Expanding the boundary
On the second Thursday after the shooting, Rabbi Silver pulled onto Forbes Avenue and joined a line of morning traffic. He can do most of the inspection from the car — making sure the lechis, or poles that travel partway up a utility pole, are upright and in good shape, as are the wires that run between them.
A drooping string caught his eye. Not ideal, but not a deal breaker. He turned right on Beeler Street then stopped. Something wasn’t quite right.
He pulled over in front of a minivan into which Rabbi Shlomo Silverman was loading his kids.
“Good morning, Rabbi,” Rabbi Silverman’s wife called from the doorstep.
Rabbi Silver crossed the street to find new wiring on a pole that had dislodged the eruv string. The lechi and the wire must connect at a right angle and the wire must be above the lechi, he explained — just like a doorway.
Rabbi Silver unzipped his heavy jacket and pulled out a notebook.
Many utility poles used in the eruv have small medallions with numbers on top and “PE” for Pittsburgh eruv on the bottom. But not this one, so he noted the nearest house.
Hewould pass that on later to the electrician who has tended to the eruv for nearly two decades. The electrician is Roman Catholic and probably Pittsburgh’s second-best authority on the eruv.
“They’re moving the poles,” Rabbi Silverman called after Rabbi Silver.
That work will need to be monitored, he replied, and asked the younger rabbi to keep him in the loop when it happens. Rabbi Silverman, who lives across the street from the pole in question, promised to oblige.
Rabbi Silverman’s home is within the eruv, but some of the students he serves as the Chabad rabbi of Carnegie Mellon University live outside of it. He has asked for an expansion.
Rabbi Silver has heard enough such requests from students and staff at the local universities and hospitals that the eruv is now being expanded to include Oakland, Shadyside and parts of Bloomfield. The wider perimeter, which will double the eruv in size, should be completed in the next few weeks, the rabbi said.
A sanctuary riddled with bullets
The eruv has been widening since its founding in 1986, when it included only a small part of Squirrel Hill.
“The cordoned off area of Pittsburgh looks a lot like the original eruv,” someone tweeted after the Tree of Life massacre.
If there’s some poetry in Rabbi Silver meticulously tending to the boundary of an intentionally created community just days after its deadly invasion, he hasn’t had time to think about it.
It was time to inspect Wilkins Avenue.
Wilkins, it turns out, is one of the hardest streets to check. Parked cars often block the lechis from view.
So Rabbi Silver slowed down. He drove past the makeshift victims’ memorial on the ground at Murray Avenue on the left, then past the Tree of Life synagogue on his right.
Inside, the sanctuary is pierced with bullet holes. They riddle the ark, which holds the Torah. They pockmark the bimah, a podium from which a rabbi speaks to the congregation.
Rabbi Silver has been thinking about what happened constantly, but he’s had no chance to sit with his thoughts and feel them.
“I couldn’t focus on my feelings, the fragility,” he said.
First, it was all the cable news vans, the reporters calling. The preparations for his Torah reading at last week’s Shabbat services. Having a police officer stand guard at his synagogue last weekend. The shiva visits. The cleanup.
Rabbi Silver was asked to inspect the cleanup of the personal effects and the blood of the victims, which Jewish tradition dictates should be buried along with the people.
The first time he came home from seeing the inside of the synagogue, he broke down. It’s too emotional to talk about, he said, and stopped talking.
Return to the ghetto?
The rules of eruv are complicated and many.
It must be contiguous. It can’t include cemeteries because, by definition, no one lives there. Walls must be at least 36 inches tall. Fenceposts can’t be more than 10 inches apart.
Major thoroughfares like the Parkway East are excluded — you simply can’t make the argument that they’re a private space. Hillsides can serve as part of the boundary, but only those steeper than 23 degrees.
Rabbi Silver has been doing this for decades. A London native, he came to Pittsburgh in 1990 and became the rabbi in charge of the eruv a few years later.
The term “eruv” actually refers to a piece of bread that unites a community, he said. Every year, an Orthodox rabbi is designated to represent the entire community and brings a box of matzo to a host synagogue. The idea is by leaving your bread in someone else’s house, it becomes your own.
This year, the matzo is in Rabbi Silver’s synagogue, Young Israel of Greater Pittsburgh on Bartlett Street.
An eruv doesn’t announce itself, especially to those who don’t know what to look for.
It is meaningful to a small community, but dependent on a much larger one. Electric and telephone utilities have agreements with the Pittsburgh eruv. Every 20 years or so, Rabbi Silver shows up at the county government office holding a silver dollar — a symbolic payment for “renting” the roads.
As he drove down an alley behind Braddock Avenue on Thursday, the rabbi tracked the progress of the handicap ramps being installed. PennDOT and city officials had reached out to discuss how the construction should avoid disturbing the eruv. It was a touching gesture yet one he’s come to expect in Pittsburgh.
That wasn’t always the case.
According to an ethnographic study of Squirrel Hill and Greenfield commissioned by the Steel Industry Heritage Corp. in 1993, the eruv got off to a somewhat rocky start.
“People were so upset about it,” recalled Geraldine Palkowitz, then-president of the Eruv Committee, in the report. “Even the Jewish community. People who don’t understand what it is said that it was return to the ghetto.”
She said noise around town made the utilities nervous. “They said if there’s any more negative publicity, they weren’t going to let us use their poles.”
For many years, Rabbi Silver was reluctant to publicize the eruv, cautious about the kind of attention eruvim have gotten elsewhere.
Though they exist in many cites — there are a number of them in New York; in Philadelphia; the Washington, D.C., eruv encircles the White House, Capitol building and the Supreme Court — legal and public challenges tend to sound the same notes. Either it’s seen as some promotion of religion, a way to separate Jews from others, or, in antiSemitic terms that have been thrown around at public hearings, a way for Orthodox Jews to “invade” a neighborhood.
A recent case in Mahwah, N.J. — where the township passed an ordinance prohibiting Orthodox Jews from using utility poles to construct an eruv (and from playing in township parks) — brought the topic back into the courts and into the news. It was later struck down by a judge.
“I think that there’s just a lot of paranoia,” Rabbi Silver said. “A lot of anti-Semites are just worried that it’s costing them money.”
Carrying (guns) on Shabbat
It’s not clear exactly how many people use the Pittsburgh eruv. Rabbi Silver estimates it might be up to 600, taking into account the 518 names in the Orthodox family directory and some conservative Jews that keep Shabbat as well.
As he completed the inspection Thursday, Rabbi Silver sat back in the driver’s seat and said he’s been thinking about guns.
Does an eruv allow Jews to carry guns to synagogue on the Sabbath? The question wasn’t just theoretical. It is being asked by Jews, not just in Pittsburgh but in other American Jewish communities that spent their first Shabbat after the Tree of Life shooting with armed guards outside their temples.
It made sense to Rabbi Silver that Saturday’s Parshah, or weekly Torah portion, was about the brothers Jacob and Esau.
In the story, their father, blind Isaac, decides to give a blessing to Esau, who was a hunter and a man of violence. But Isaac’s wife Rebecca encouraged the gentle Jacob to pose as his brother to get the blessing instead. To disguise himself, Jacob put goat skin on his hands — to mimic Esau’s rough and hairy skin. Isaac gave Jacob the blessing. But the father had his suspicions — the hands were Esau’s hands, but the voice was the voice of Jacob.
When he was little, Rabbi Silver recalled his mother, a Holocaust survivor, telling him never to bring a gun into the house — not a toy gun or even a water gun.
“That’s [ for] Esau’s hands,” she would say.
On Thursday evening, a New York yeshiva posted a YouTube video of Rabbi Silver explaining the story.
“We went through a very big scare,” he said reflecting on the shooting. “And as a result, there are a lot of [Jacobs], a lot of Jewish people who have been talking about arming themselves. Carrying weapons.”
There might come a time when it’s necessary to take up arms like Esau, he said.
“But we all know that no matter what, our strength still lies in … the voice.”
On Friday morning, the barebones website for the Pittsburgh eruv broadcast the results of Rabbi Silver’s inspection.
“The eruv is up.”